


Controlled Burn

by standinginanicedress



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Enemies to Lovers, M/M, Probably exactly what you’d expect, Road Trip, stiles is a witch bc he always is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-07
Packaged: 2021-03-06 05:28:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 53,933
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25578091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standinginanicedress/pseuds/standinginanicedress
Summary: Stiles sighs through his nose and takes a couple of steps away, to the other side of the alley where there’s a brick wall and a dumpster, and not much else. “Well, sure, okay, but what are you suggesting? That we load up the car and go off in search of someplace she’s only maybe, possibly been?”This is a ludicrous idea, of course it is, but when Stiles looks at Derek, he can tell that this, this absolutely absurd suggestion, is exactly what Derek thinks. It is exactly what he came here to ask Stiles to do. “I’ve traced her scent to the next town over, so I have a start.”“Oh, Christ, Derek,” Stiles practically finishes his beer in one go, downing it quickly, because he needs that alcohol in his system if he’s really going to entertain this idea. “You realize that would be days, possibly weeks of being in a car alone with me? Me. Derek, me. Stiles Stilinski. A witch.”Derek’s jaw is set, his eyes intense, his shoulders taught with tension. “Yeah. I have weighed the pros and cons of this.”
Relationships: Derek Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Comments: 169
Kudos: 1266





	1. Into the Fire

**Author's Note:**

> This is another one that I dug out of the deepest recesses of unfinished works from back in the day and have been working on mostly as an exercise or practice. Back in the day I was writing every single day and could churn shit out like it was whatever - these days it takes me a lot longer lmfaooo so I’m trying to get back into the habit!! I have tons and tons of unfinished, barely started works and have honestly thought about posting what I have of them to see which ones people would even want to read so I can choose ones to work on.

It is raining on the day that Derek first comes and asks Stiles for help. Cats and dogs.

Stiles is in the library, towards the back, where there’s not usually anybody else aside from students crouched over laptops and textbooks, silent. He’s nose deep in a dusty old book with his back to the rest of the room, entirely engrossed in the page turning and the work of his pen as he studiously takes notes for his own reference, so it’s a wonder that Stiles even notices it at at all – but he does, all the same. 

That familiar creeping feeling of something not human walking through the doorway strikes his neck, so the hairs stand on end. It’s easy to ignore it, especially after living in Beacon Hills his whole life, where the supernatural population pretty much doubles when compared to other towns of similar size – but for whatever reason, when it’s Derek Hale in specific, that spine tingling is almost impossible to ignore. 

Stiles closes his book and turns around, frowning. Derek is there, of course he is, lingering at the entrance to the study room, dripping rain onto the marble floors. He will not come in here, Stiles knows, because this is a silent room where talking is prohibited. And Derek is here to talk to him. 

They stare at each other for just a second longer than is entirely necessary, Derek’s expression motionless, Stiles still and agitated. To say they don’t like each other would be fair. To say that they hate each other would be only a hair too far. 

This is an inescapable conversation, Derek has proven himself to be hard to shake on more than one occasion. So Stiles closes his notebook and pockets his pen, tucking it safely into the front of his flannel as he stands and abandons the big old dusty book for a librarian to collect at the end of the day. Derek watches all of this with a twist to his mouth, as though he wishes he had just about any other options on planet earth other than debasing himself by talking to the town looney toon. 

Popular opinion actually has it at Stiles being likable if at times a bit strange and annoying. Derek Hale is an outlier who believes Stiles to be a scourge on what would otherwise be a perfect little town for him to isolate himself. Out here, the woods are dark and deep, and people don’t tend to ask a lot of questions, and are happy to leave strangers like Derek alone to their own devices. Derek is free to run and hunt all he wants in the deepest parts of the forest, and when he goes to the grocery store all sweaty and dirty, people just assume he’s a construction worker or something, leave him be. 

It would certainly be his oasis. If it weren’t for Stiles Stilinski. 

When Stiles gets closer, Derek moves farther into the hallway, toward the bannister that overlooks the downstairs. There is chatter out here, the sound of the coffee grinder from the espresso shop, the steam wand, people walking, and Derek Hale dripping. 

“I take it you’re summoning me,” Stiles says, coming to a stop a full two feet away from where Derek is hovering. 

Derek’s shoulders tense – as if he’s not the one who imperiously demanded this meeting to happen in the first place. “If I had anyone else to go to, trust me, I’d be doing that.”

“You know I love it when you flatter me,” Stiles’ tone is flat, sarcastic, and Derek doesn’t even flinch under the vitriol of it. He should be used to it by now. “What is it?”

Again, Derek looks tense, beyond tense, way more tense than a simple conversation should have anyone be. He looks about-to-go-into-risky-surgery tense, all stiff with his eyes lowered and a frown on his face. This makes sense when he says, “I need your help,” nearly spitting it out on the ground for how unhappy he is with having to say this at all. 

It’s as though it’s a great shame, to have to come to Stiles of all people for help. 

Stiles sighs and looks away, down to the ground floor off the balcony where he and Derek stand. People teem in and out of the front doors like fish through a river, and Stiles focuses on this detail because it is far better than having to see the look on Derek’s face. “It must be bad, if you’re asking me.” 

“It is bad,” Derek agrees, voice low. He is also refusing to look at Stiles, so the two of them look like they’re talking to themselves up here rather than to each other. It’s always been like that, between them. “I’m…desperate.” 

“Okay,” Stiles isn’t so cruel as to leave Derek dangling when he’s clearly distraught, so he sucks in a deep breath and dares himself to look directly at him, full on. Derek is wet and pathetic looking, even with his tough guy leather jacket and his huge size and his firm jawline. He looks like a kicked dog, and Stiles may not like him and may not be liked by him, but even he feels sorry for Derek, in this moment. “Hit me with it.”

Derek looks right back at him, eyes intense. “You’re good at finding people.”

Well, of course he is. Stiles has very many specialties – he’s half decent at tarot, can make a pretty killer potion depending on the day, and he’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of magic in general. But finding people, he does tend to excel at. Everyone knows that, so Stiles doesn’t grace this with a response other than to raise his eyebrows in a quest for more information. 

“And I need you to find someone.” 

“Who do you need me to find?”

Derek frowns. “My sister.” 

“Laura?” 

“Seeing as how the rest are dead, yeah.” Derek says things like this not in a beg for sympathy, but more in a caustic, cutting way meant to make others feel like shit. Stiles is used to these barbs from the man in question, so he just blinks and nods. 

“Laura is missing?”

“She just –“ he thrusts his hands out, frustrated, angry, “disappeared. Into thin air.”

Stiles looks away again, at the girls down below running around making coffees and steaming milk. Laura is really all the family that Derek Hale has left in this world, so of course he would be beside himself upon waking up one morning to find her vanished. “No sign of her?”

“It looks like she packed a bag,” he says this almost through grit teeth. “Her toothbrush is gone, some of her clothes, her car.” 

“So at least we know she left of her own volition.”

“Or she was forced.”

Stiles immediately puts a stopper in that idea. “Let’s not think like that. How long has she been –“

“It’ll be a week today.”

Stiles sucks in a deep breath – that’s not good. The first forty eight hours are crucial, so to already be at the seven day mark with no sign of her whatsoever…that’s really not good. It wouldn’t do at all to say this out loud to Derek, so he just keeps his face impassive. “I assume you brought something of hers, seeing as how you know the drill.” 

Derek does know the drill. This is not the first time that Derek has been in Stiles’ company when he’s performed a locating spell – closer to the tenth, actually. They’ve known each other nearly their entire lives, after all, and became even closer acquainted after Stiles discovered he was a witch in high school. Derek might hate magic with every fiber of his being, but even he has to admit that it has its merits, occasionally. 

As such, he reaches into his jean pocket and produces a small token of Laura’s. It looks like a trinket, one that she might have made herself – a little doll made out of yarn. It seems old and well loved, so Derek knows even more about the spell than he would ever dare to let on. He went to Laura’s apartment and combed the place for a token of strong sentimental value, knowing precisely that that’s what Stiles would ask him for. 

Gingerly, Stiles reaches out and takes it into his palms, cradling it lightly. He mutters the spell he memorized when he was fourteen, expecting the familiar burst of energy, the instant photograph to appear in his head like it always has whenever he’s done this exact spell before. 

Instead, he hits a brick wall. The magic recoils, so strongly it gives him an instantaneous headache, like he’s been hit over the head. 

Derek notices it when Stiles winces, nearly fumbles the doll onto the ground before he catches himself with a furious blink. “What is it?” Derek demands, taking a step closer, so he’s nearly in Stiles’ personal bubble. 

Stiles rubs his forehead and lets out a long sigh. With a shake of his head, he holds the doll out for Derek to take back, unable to meet the other man’s eyes. “It would seem that your sister has gone to great lengths to make sure she wouldn’t be followed,” he says this quietly, dreading the response he is likely to get. “There’s a block on it.”

“What?” Derek is angry. It’s his automatic setting. “What do you mean? What the fuck is a block?”

“She must have put a block on everything she left behind, figuring that you would come to me and ask me to do the spell.” 

“What does that _mean_?”

“It means I can’t use magic to find her,” he thrusts the doll at him again, so he’ll hurry up and take it away – it’s making his head pound. 

Instead of ripping it out of Stiles’ hand like Stiles would’ve expected, Derek pushes it and Stiles’ hand back, away, like he’s disgusted by the suggestion that he take it back. “You just don’t want to do me the favor,” he hisses, and Stiles rolls his eyes.

“Right, because I’m that shitty.”

“You’re a know it all,” he corrects, eyes going hard. “So it surprises me you’d pretend to not know this.” 

“Why don’t you listen to my heartbeat?” Stiles demands, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t perform any magic to help you, she saw to it. Does it sound like I’m lying?”

Derek hesitates. Stiles’ heartbeat doesn’t stutter, and so Derek knows that he’s telling the truth. He is unhappy about it, but it’s the truth whether he likes it or not. “There must be something you can do. You’re…you can do anything.” 

The compliment, if one were to go so far as to call it that, is surprising. Stiles would’ve thought that Derek believed Stiles to be a completely inept clown, at best, so he’s taken aback for a moment, blinking. “Derek,” he starts, pushing the doll at him again, “I’m not sure how comfortable I am helping you find someone who very obviously does not want to be found. I know that hurts to hear, but –“

Derek snatches the doll so quickly, Stiles half expects to look down and see claw marks going up his wrist. Instead, Stiles’ hand and wrist are unharmed, and Derek is already gone and walking away before Stiles can barely blink. “Thanks for the fucking help,” he growls as he goes, vanishing down the steps like an angry, drippy blur of black clothing, blending in with the rest of the crowd on the ground floor.

**

It’s at the bar the following Friday night that Derek chooses to materialize again – it’s just as noticeable as last time, not only because of the werewolf tingles Stiles gets, but also because he sticks out like a sore thumb, with everyone else.

Stiles is sitting with Scott and Allison, drinking beer and yelling at one another to be heard over the pounding music and the crowd all around them. Scott and Allison are oblivious, their backs turned as they continue on their conversation, but Stiles is facing the entrance, so he sees it instantly. 

Derek Hale, walking inside, looking around like a man on a mission. And Stiles is sure, exactly then, that he’s the mission. He drinks his beer and frowns, rolling his eyes so hard it’s a wonder they don’t come out of his skull like marbles. He decides that he will not do Derek the favor of being easy to find, ducking low in the hopes that Scott’s shoulders will block Derek’s view of him; of course, this is all futile. The smell of a witch even in a place with this many offensive scents is as easy for a wolf to pick out as finding the sun on a clear day. 

Over the smell of human sweat, liquor, vomit, trash, and god knows what else, Derek finds him. Stiles knows it the moment it’s happened, peering over Scott’s side, because Derek’s got eyes on him. He’s coming fast, and Stiles feels like a hunted deer, shrinking smaller and muttering an agitated _god dammit_ under his breath. 

Scott hears. “What is it?” He asks, at the same moment that Derek hops up onto the raised platform where their table is.

“Gird your loins,” he tells his friends, who give him puzzled expressions in return. 

“What?” Allison puts her drink down, and then Derek is there. He presses himself against the side of the table, so abrupt that Scott startles, nearly fumbling his own beer down onto the table. 

“Derek,” he greets, quickly catching his beer before it smashes. “Uh…”

Derek frowns at them in lieu of a greeting. These are not his three favorite people on planet earth. Scott he hates because he’s dating Allison, and Allison he hates because…you know. There’s bad blood between the families, which of course is understandable. At the same time, Stiles sometimes wants to throw his hands in the air and remind everyone that Allison didn’t know anything about that, was a kid at the time, shouldn’t be held to blame for something that her crazy fucking aunt did years ago. 

“Can I speak to you alone?” He barks at Stiles, who grips his beer tighter and fantasizes about throwing it directly into Derek’s face. 

“I’d rather not be alone with you.”

“Don’t be a dick,” he snaps, and Stiles fantasizes some more. Across the table Allison looks about ready to leap up and vanish into the crowd just to be rid of this awful situation, and Scott just looks baffled. It is bizarre that Derek would want anything to do with Stiles, after all. “You think I like coming here to beg for your help? Here, of all places?”

Here of all places, indeed. In the purple glow of the neon lights and the loud music, people dancing all around him, he looks remarkably stupid. Derek Hale, natural born predator, here at the bar making merry with everyone else. It does not add up in the least bit. 

“No,” Stiles admits, softening his glare a bit. “Let’s just…” He hops off his stool, taking his beer along with him as he goes, gesturing his head to the back door where there’s a smoker’s section in the alley out back. 

His friends are startled by this development. Allison says, “are you sure you want to…” and Scott says, “do you want me to come?” 

There are a lot of reasons for them to be concerned about Stiles being left alone with Derek Hale, yes, but even Stiles knows that many of those reasons are not exactly fair. Yes, among the supernatural community in this town Derek does have a reputation of being the resident hot head and short fuse. He’s the tortured misunderstood bad boy type, and the stories about him going nuts and beating the hell out of people for looking at him wrong never really stop. Stiles is smart and also a bit clairvoyant, so he’s always known all those stories are to be taken with a grain of salt, and even more so he’s known that many of them are just that – stories. 

He waves them off. “I’ll be fine,” he explains, and with that, he starts walking away, knowing that Derek is hot on his heels. 

Outside in the cool night air, Derek seems bigger. There are a handful of people smoking and talking out here, but not many, so it’s just Stiles and Derek and the neon glow, and Derek’s eyes on him again. 

The way Derek looks at him is not the same way that anyone else he’s ever met looks at him. Stiles could never put it to words, and he will not try. 

“You’re following me now?”

Derek levels him with another one of those inexplicable looks. “As if you’re so hard to find.”

That, Stiles has to concede. Stiles doesn’t do a whole lot or go a terrible many different places. He goes to his house, the library, the bars, the grocery store, and that about sums it up. It does irritate him, though, to think that Derek has got him pegged, like that. 

“Look,” he starts, as Stiles sips his beer, “I shouldn’t have gotten angry with you last time.” 

“Angry is just kinda your way,” Stiles says. 

“Yes,” he agrees, because it’s true, so why deny it. “But you know, I’m – you know me.” 

“That is debatable.” 

“Fuck off,” Derek hisses at him, and Stiles has born these attacks before, so he just stands there and nods his head like he had expected it. “You know me well enough to know that this, me coming here to this shit hole or to the fucking library just to find you, that’s not – I don’t do these things lightly.” 

“Be that as it may,” Stiles waves this all off, “I was not lying when I told you that there’s not really a whole lot that I can do to –“

“But if we were on her trail,” he interrupts, so Stiles closes his mouth with a click of his teeth. “If we could get on her trail and find where she’s going, where she’s been, then you could find things she hasn’t hexed or whatever the hell she’s done. Places she’s been, things she’s touched, just…”

Stiles sighs through his nose and takes a couple of steps away, to the other side of the alley where there’s a brick wall and a dumpster, and not much else. “Well, sure, okay, but what are you suggesting? That we load up the car and go off in search of someplace she’s only maybe possibly been?” 

This is a ludicrous idea, of course it is, but when Stiles looks at Derek, he can tell that this, this absolutely absurd suggestion, is exactly what Derek thinks. It is exactly what he came here to ask Stiles to do. “I’ve traced her scent to the next town over, so I have a start.” 

“Oh, Christ, Derek,” Stiles practically finishes his beer in one go, downing it quickly, because he needs that alcohol in his system if he’s really going to entertain this idea. “You realize that would be days, possibly weeks of being in a car alone with me? Me. Derek, me. Stiles Stilinski. A witch.” 

Derek’s jaw is set, his eyes intense, his shoulders taught with tension. “Yeah. I have weighed the pros and cons of this.” 

“And you came out the other side with more pros than cons? I find that hard to believe. It’s me, Derek.” 

“Maybe this is hard for you to understand or to fully grasp,” he puts his hands on his hips, looks Stiles up and down, as though Stiles is some little bug he wishes he could squish, “you and all your friends and this whole life you have where you have everything. I have nothing.”

“I don’t have everything,” Stiles argues, voice thin. 

“The only thing that I have in this world is my sister, that is all that I fucking have left,” he looks at the neon sign above their heads, at the crescent moon in the sky, at the ground, at anything but at Stiles. It’s like this is some great shame, to admit that his world is that small, to admit that he’s this desperate. To Stiles, of all people. “I would do just about anything to at least know she was okay, do you get that? So, yes, I would even do this with you.” 

Stiles throws his beer into the dumpster and runs his hands over his face, again and again, scrubbing and scrubbing as though he thinks that will make Derek disappear, or that he can go back in time and make this all stop from happening. As he does so, he thinks that Derek is at least partially right.

Stiles does not have everything, not by a long shot, and he resents Derek’s implication that Stiles has never been through loss or grief. His mother died, and Derek knows that, and it was like the loss of a fucking limb. But Derek is always lording his own tragedies over everyone else’s head, as though no one could possibly understand, no one will ever get it, what it’s like to lose your entire family in one go. 

Maybe he’s right. Somewhat. Only a little bit. That kind of pain is unique. It turns people like Derek, who had been friendly and actually smiled every now and again before all that happened to him, into husks. It turns people like Derek into this – this mass of pain and anger, in an alley, begging and pleading a witch to help him out, just a little. 

It is the exact right string on Stiles to pull. The sympathy card. Stiles is sarcastic and defensive and smart, but he’s also empathetic. Derek knows that, and has used that to his advantage, to get Stiles to throw his hands in the air. 

So, Stiles does. He throws his hands in the air and agrees. “Fuck it,” he snaps. “Just, fuck it. Fine.”

Above their heads, the neon light surges brighter for a moment, before it crackles and goes out like it’s been overloaded with energy, from somewhere or something. The other people down the alley from them are surprised and react, moving closer to it to see what had happened, hooting and hollering because it had been a show. 

But Derek and Stiles just stand there and hold each other’s eye contact. “Thank you,” Derek says. It’s the first time he’s ever said it.

**

“I know I don’t need to tell you how bad of an idea this is,” Allison says to him, watching with a shrewd gaze as Stiles shovels clothing into a duffle bag. “I know I don’t need to tell you that Derek Hale isn’t just a werewolf, he’s also an incredibly erratic emotionally compromised werewolf who’s been known to hurt people for the slightest wrong look in his direction.”

Stiles huffs a sigh. “He has never once hurt me, personally,” he says, moving to his desk to dump a handful of crystals and a deck of tarot cards into his bag with individual thumps. It’s true – Derek has had many opportunities over the years to claw Stiles half to death, and has even looked like he sincerely wanted to do exactly that from time to time, but he has never once lifted a finger to harm him. 

He’s shoved him into a wall or two, yes. Physically overpowered him, yes. But harmed him? Actually hurt him? Not once. In fact, Stiles has never seen Derek hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. 

“You’re acting like I’m going on a road trip with a known serial killer or something.” 

“More or less,” Scott pipes up from the couch, looking over the back of it with a frown as Stiles continues to pack like neither of them have spoken at all. “Remember that time he tried to beat the hell out of me?”

Stiles does, indeed, remember that time. “That only came after you tried to sneak onto his property. You know how weird he is about people going near that house anymore.”

“Weird isn’t the word I’d use,” Allison corrects, her eyes narrowing. “Psychotic is.” 

Stiles grabs a couple of books off of their shelves and into the bag they go. “He basically begged me to do this with him, what was I supposed to say?”

“Uh, no?” Scott says this with a scoff, like it’s so fucking obvious, like of course, duh, what are you, crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind? “A road trip with Derek Hale…I half expect to never see you again!” 

“Oh, whatever,” Stiles rolls his eyes and zips his bag up with finality. “If he tries anything, you know I could handle myself. I’m not some defenseless little weasel going into the wolf’s den, I could take him, and you know that.” 

“Well…” Allison puts her hands on her hips, and looks to Scott for more input. They do not want him to go. They are going to do anything and say anything to stop him from doing this, because Derek Hale is undesirable number one as far as most people in this town are concerned. The people who don’t know he’s a werewolf assume he’s just a weirdo and keep their distance, and the people who do know exactly what he is assume he’s a psycho killer and keep their distance. 

It could be said that no one really knows Derek Hale at all. Except for his sister. Who’s gone, without a trace. 

“How would you guys feel if I went missing, or if your parents did?” He looks at both of them, and they both close their mouths. “Wouldn’t you want me to do anything in my power to help you? How would you feel if the only person you knew who could help refused to do so? Just because everyone else thinks you guys are freaks or something?”

“I never said I thought he was a freak,” Allison is quick to correct, but Stiles waves her off again. 

“You guys don’t really know him, and fuck it, neither do I,” he slings his bag onto his shoulder, “but Christ. A little compassion every now and then wouldn’t kill you, even for someone like him.” 

For her part, Allison has the decency to at least look a little bit guilty. Even though what happened that left Derek all alone in the first place was not her fault, not by a long shot, there is a sense of familial guilt that she carries with her at all times. Sometimes that makes her resentful towards Derek, because she’s a human being and that type of feeling comes naturally, so she says mean things about him because it’s a defense mechanism against that shitty, terrible feeling. 

Scott, however, still looks peeved. “If he lays even a single finger on you, you send up the fucking bat signal and I’ll come down there and bite his head off.” 

“I thought we already established he could easily beat the hell out of you, Scott.”

Scott is offended, mouth opening and closing, but Stiles is already moving toward the front door. “It shouldn’t be more than a couple of weeks, and I’ll keep in touch.”

“Every day,” Allison is following him, step by step, to the door. “You’ll check in every day, Stiles.” 

“Yup, sure,” he agrees, “I cannot imagine he and I are going to be having very many heart to hearts, so I’ll probably be desperate for the human connection anyway.” 

Allison is hovering behind him, wringing her hands together. These two are genuinely worried that something abominable is going to happen on this road trip – honestly, Stiles is only concerned because Derek has struck Stiles as being entirely insufferable, not because he thinks Derek would ever do anything to him. 

“Just be careful,” Allison tells him, reaching out to squeeze him on the shoulder. “Derek is troubled.” 

Troubled. Stiles churns that word around in his head, as he steps outside onto the front porch, sets his bag down, sits down on the top step to wait for Derek to come collect him. He looks out at the tree line, the leaves rustling in the wind, the darkness beyond it all, and thinks…troubled. A person who has gone through what Derek has would certainly be troubled. A person who has all but banished himself to the woods to wallow and be all alone, almost all the time, would certainly be troubled. 

But surely there has to be more to him than just that. Stiles has never known why, when everyone else was so ready to write him off as a lost cause, Stiles has always clung to the idea that there is more to him. There must be. 

When Derek finally does pull up, Stiles immediately stands with his bag and watches the car slide to a stop in the road, idling there, waiting for him. It’s as black as ever. 

“You’re late,” Stiles tells him as he thumps himself into the passenger seat after throwing his bag into the backseat alongside one that Derek must have packed for himself. It’s funny to imagine Derek with personal belongings. 

“I was getting us coffee,” he gestures to the center console, where there are indeed two waiting coffee cups, one on Stiles’ side with a sticker on the mouth-hole. Stiles is surprised, eyebrows going up into his hairline. 

“Oh,” he says. He picks the coffee up and takes a sip. “How do you know how I take my coffee?” 

Derek side-eyes him, hitting the gas and slowly navigating his way out of the neighborhood. “I’ve gotten coffee with you before.”

Shit, they have, haven’t they? Stiles barely remembers it, but yes, they had gone to get coffee together once before. Derek needed Stiles to do a perimeter spell to keep trespassers off his property, and it was a lengthy piece of magic that required an all-nighter to accurately get done. So they had gone to the nearest coffee place and gotten drinks. Stiles had completely forgotten that that even happened, but here Derek is, remembering it well enough that he memorized Stiles’ exact coffee order. 

“Thanks,” Stiles says, awkward, because he’s never really said thanks to Derek before, and also, he’s never really needed to because Derek isn’t in the business of doing nice things for others. 

Derek grips his steering wheel so hard his knuckles go white. His teeth are grit, like he dreads having to speak this out loud, but he says it all the same. “You are doing me a huge favor. It’s the least I could do.”

Stiles lets that settle among them in silence, as they get out of town, onto the highway. He takes the time to observe Derek’s car from the inside for the first time in his life, in spite of all the times he’s seen it before. He’s got a nice leather interior, and the buttons for the radio and air conditioning are worn down some from being pressed again and again over the years. The foot wells are muddy and there are some leaves, but otherwise, the car is pristine. Stiles had expected nothing more and nothing less. 

“You know, Allison and Scott were all concerned that you were just in this to kill me or something,” he goes for funny, in saying this, but Derek does not look amused. “Uh, I told them to relax, though.” 

Derek frowns at the sunshine beaming in through his windshield. “Funny, for Allison to think I would kill anyone.” 

“Oh, yikes,” he mutters, looking out his own window with a snort of a laugh. That was a harsh one. “You aim right for the jugular.”

Derek shrugs, like yes, yes I do. 

Stiles is quiet for another few minutes, watching scenery go by. Then, “Scott said he would come and beat your ass if anything funny happened.” 

Now this, Derek finds funny. His lips quirk, just the slightest at the corners, so Stiles grins at him and nods his head. 

“That’s what I said, trust me,” he smirks. 

Another quiet moment passes. 

“What do you think?” Derek asks him, seemingly out of nowhere. Several minutes have passed since either of them said anything, so Stiles turns to him with a look of evident confusion on his face. Derek clarifies, after clearing his throat and shifting a bit uncomfortably in his seat. “Do you think I’m going to do anything to you?”

“Oh,” Stiles shakes his head with a short laugh. “No, not really. What would the point be? I have had the passing thought that perhaps you’d try to irritate me to death, but other than that, no.” 

Derek has no response to that. On they drive, without even the radio on to fill the silence, as the trees of Beacon Hills fade out until they’re scarce, winding through a mountain pass to come to a wide open space, complete with horses and a handful of cows as well. Stiles finishes his coffee and sits quietly, leaning back into his seat, glancing only every now and then at Derek.

He’s still, like a statue, save for his attention on the road. 

Derek pulls off at an exit some two hours later, in a town Stiles doesn’t recognize the name of – it seems to only be as big as a gas station truck stop, a diner, and a single motel. The motel is where Derek goes, coming to a stop in the parking lot with a frown on his face.

“This is where the trail ends, right here,” he tells Stiles, who nods and looks at the building itself. 

It’s pink, which is perhaps the only interesting thing about it. Otherwise, it looks like any other motel one might find off any old exit anywhere in the United States. Neon lights, a faded old sign, a line of doors and a front office. 

“Are you getting anything?” Derek asks him, and Stiles has to resist laughing in his face. 

“I don’t know if you quite get how this all works,” he says, unbuckling his seatbelt and gesturing for Derek to do the same. “Let’s go in and ask if anyone’s seen her.” 

The office is a tiny little room with a desk and a potted plant, the air conditioning blasting. Derek looks insane in the pink room, kind of like a clown in a cemetery for the imagery, so Stiles hides a smile as they approach the desk, where an older woman is waiting to greet them. 

“You boys need a room?” She asks, looking between the two of them as if she’s trying to decide if they’re brothers or fucking. 

“We’re actually looking for someone,” Stiles corrects, pointing to Derek, who’s already reaching into his wallet to produce the picture of Laura that Stiles told him to bring along with him. It’s a decent picture, of her smiling with a kitten in her hands, sunshine lighting up her face. For her part, Laura actually figured out long ago how to deal with her grief and trauma in a way that can actually be considered healthy – she’s decently nice and shows her face around town, at least. Derek, on the other hand…

The manager puts her glasses on and squints at the picture, cocking her head to the side. Then, recognition flits across her face, as she pulls her glasses off and nods. “Yes. Probably about a week ago, she came in and got a room.”

Derek pounces on the information immediately, leaning over the desk, all rules of social decorum completely flying out the window. “Did she seem upset or hurt or like she was under duress –“

“Oh, no, nothing like that, nothing like that,” she assures him, and then nervously flicks her eyes to Stiles, who perhaps for the first time in his entire life is being regarded as the sane and normal one in the room. Even with the general aura of strange, weird, wrong that tends to ooze out of his pores like sweat where normal people are concerned, she has decided that she likes him better than Derek. “She just came in and got a room.”

“Are you sure there wasn’t something that –“

Stiles cuts him off. He’s not getting anywhere. “Maybe we could take a look at the room she stayed in,” he suggests, and Derek shoots him a look, like Stiles is somehow stepping on his toes. All the same, she agrees immediately and pulls a key with a fading pink tag down from a wall where many of its identical brothers and sisters are lined up as well. There’s a chipped and fading number thirteen emblazoned on the front and back of the tag, and when they get to the door which it opens, thirteen is there again in gold. 

She keys inside, revealing a run down old hotel room, nothing more, and nothing less. There’s a queen sized bed and a window where almost half of the blinds are missing. A phone, a notepad left blank aside an untouched pen. The door to a bathroom wide open. 

It reeks like cleaning supplies and fresh linens in here, of course it does – anything that Laura would have touched or used or even sat or laid on has been scrubbed clean of all evidences of that having happened at all. Like she was never here at all. 

Derek knows this. He can smell the bleach and Lysol and laundry detergent even better than Stiles can, as well as the stench of the x number of people who have been inside this room since Laura had been. There is no way, none whatsoever, that Stiles could ever hope to use anything in this room to do a locating spell on. 

Still, Derek walks inside and looks around, eyes almost insane with the intensity he lasers onto everything in this room. Maybe he’s thinking that there has to be something, anything, some tiny square of table that the cleaning crew never quite reaches, some corner of this room that never sees the light of day where Laura’s feet might have walked, something, anything. 

There isn’t anything. Stiles turns around, away from the room, up to the sunlight. The sky is bright blue without a cloud in sight, a stark contrast to the mood in the room behind him. The manager says, “not much to see, really,” while Derek walks back and forth across the garish pink carpeting. Over a coffee stain embedded into the fibers years ago, again and again. 

“Let’s go,” Stiles says to him, because she’s right. There is absolutely nothing at all to see here, not even a speck of dust. Derek paces once more, twice more. It’s like his brain is buffering, trying to catch up with the information as it is being presented to him. 

Then, without a word, he walks out of the room. He has to use his shoulder to push Stiles out of the way, not particularly hard, but enough that Stiles is irritated by it all the same. He staggers back and huffs a sigh, watching as Derek’s back moves, toward the car parked all alone among the slanted white lines in the lot. 

Stiles is left alone with the manager, who is again trying to figure the two of them out. Lovers? Brothers? Two relative strangers thrust together by the same missing girl? Her face suggests she’s landed on the former, as Stiles gives her a slight smile and shrugs his shoulders. “Thanks anyways,” he offers, and stuffs his hands into the pockets of his hoody, trailing after Derek’s puff of anger and misery. 

“So you boys aren’t getting a room?” She calls after them, as Derek pulls open his driver’s side door and all but rips it off its hinges as he slams it closed. The absolute last thing on earth that Stiles wants at this moment is to be alone in a car, that tight confined fucking space, with an angry Derek Hale.

But Christ, what else is he supposed to do? Get himself a room at the Seashell Inn? No thanks. 

Into the car he gets, closing his door much more gently behind him than Derek had. Before he’s even got his seatbelt on, Derek is hitting the gas, sending them flying back in reverse so hard that Stiles loses his grip on the seatbelt, fumbling it and smacking up against the side of the car. 

“Sorry,” Derek spits at him, while Stiles rights himself and shoots Derek a glare. 

“I feel that getting irrationally angry isn’t going to help our case very much,” he says flatly, sitting up straight. Derek is idling with his car pulled out of the space, but he makes no moves to turn left or right on the road ahead of them – because he has absolutely no fucking clue where to go. The trail ends right here, in this shithole, and his werewolf prowess has become completely useless. This is the moment where he needs to rely on Stiles, and he knows it, and he likely is not very happy about it. Especially since he had just inadvertently flung Stiles against the siding of his car. 

“You’re right,” he says this, but he’s still mad, Stiles can tell. The engine purrs, and they sit. The sun lights up Derek’s cheekbones, his collarbones exposed just barely by his shirt, his frown. The ever present fucking frown. “I need your help.” 

Stiles runs his hands down his face and sucks in a deep breath. “There is only so much I can do.”

“You are clairvoyant.”

“To a point,” Stiles admits, giving Derek the side eye. It is true, that Stiles has been known to sense things that normal people, even other supernatural people, could never hope to even guess at. He has been known to predict events, has seen danger coming, has had dreams that become prophetic. “I could make an educated guess, but it’s a lot to put on my shoulders, because I could very well be wrong.” 

Derek’s lips curve downwards even more deeply, if that were remotely possible. “It’s better than taking a wild shot in the dark, wouldn’t you say?”

Stiles scoffs. It’s barely better than a wild shot in the dark. It’s more like a shot in the semi-dark, like a shot with a blindfold on where there’s just the slightest bit of light at the bottom of his eyeline because someone hadn’t tied it on tight enough. This is not a science. It’s a guessing game. Sometimes he’s right, and he could never be arrogant enough to not admit that he’s also wrong a lot of the time. 

He looks at the road that would take them on the highway South, then at the road that would take them east. He stares at both of them for a long time, nothing but the sound of the engine and Derek’s stone cold silence to keep him company. 

It goes on for at least five minutes. Nothing happens, really – there is no tingling feeling or a voice in his head that tells him where to go, nothing quite so fantastical. All he can be sure of is that he can’t help but to stare just the slightest bit longer at the road heading east, even when he tries to tear his eyes away sooner. It could be nothing. It could just be his mind playing tricks on him. 

It’s all he has to go on. He points. “That way,” he says, and Derek does not take even one second to weigh his options. Stiles points and says go, and go Derek does without a second thought. 

He doesn’t say _you better be right_ , or even that he hopes that Stiles is. Maybe he doesn’t want to put that kind of pressure on him, or maybe he honestly is just banking everything on Stiles’ instincts. After all, Stiles is the only one of them anymore who’s got any instincts that could be useful in this search.

The road east is barren and boring. It goes from woods to long stretches of highway with nothing but the odd few other drivers on the road and farmland, to the desert in what seems like the blink of an eye. Out here Stiles counts cacti and tumbleweeds, watching them go with all the interest of paint drying. Derek still does not turn the radio on, content in the silence.

When Stiles pulls out his pocket deck of tarot, Derek makes a face, but offers no other commentary. Typically, he’d snort or scoff or winkle his nose at the bad-wrong-evil-magic smell of gunpowder that he claims wafts off of anything even slightly magically inclined. Today, he is quiet and only glances at Stiles’ fingers as he shuffles the deck. 

He flips one card over, places it on the dashboard to stare at it. 

“What does that mean?” Derek asks before Stiles even has time to process it himself. 

He sighs through his nose. “Time.”

“Time?” This is not an answer he finds satisfactory. “As in, we don’t have a lot of it?”

“On the contrary,” he pulls the card off the dash and holds it in his palm, staring at the arms of clocks, the ominous pointing fingers seeming to mock him, to mock both of them, this entire trip. “We have much more of it than either of us would care to know.” 

Derek turns fully away from the road to give Stiles that incredulous look he always does. “You know that makes absolutely no fucking sense. What you just said is jibberish.” 

He tucks the deck back into the pocket of his jeans and thinks that he sees those same clock arms tick, tick, ticking on the sun overhead, the shadows of them casting across both of their faces. It is ominous at the same time that it isn’t, somehow, and Stiles can’t explain that feeling, least of all to Derek fucking Hale, so he says not a word about it. 

Just sits back and angles himself so the shadows block the sun from his eyes, as it dips down below the horizon until it and the shadows vanish. 

Sometime past ten at night Derek admits that it’s time to stop for the night, pulling into a small town that neither of them bother to collect the name of. It’s got a high school and lots of cute little houses and a pretty library, but the two of them wind up at the Days Inn, standing in the fluorescent lights of the lobby with the smell of chlorine from the pool assaulting their senses. They look exhausted and bizarre, Stiles’ features sunken in, Derek’s anger permanently etched into his face, and the girl behind the desk eyeballs them and wonders if these two are the strangest people she’s ever seen in her life. 

They get a room with two separate double beds and her eyebrow raises just the slightest, like she’s surprised they’re not gay lovers from a romance novel off the shelf of a dying bookstore. 

Stiles throws himself onto the bed by the window after thumping his bag down on the ground, sprawling out and claiming his territory. Derek is more subdued – he takes a look around, inspecting the bed and the television and the bathroom with an unhappy set to his face. Stiles is getting bored of always having to describe Derek as mad, or unhappy, or any other negative emotion in the book, but that’s just what he simply is, almost all of the time. 

“It must be so weird to be in a hotel room with all your weird spidey senses,” Stiles pulls his shoes off one by one, so they drop onto the floor. “All the smells of different people having slept in your bed and all.” 

Derek drops his bag down with more decorum than Stiles had, setting it down gently on the ground at the foot of his bed. “It mostly just smells like bleach and soap, so that’s good.” 

“Better than semen and piss.” 

“Can’t argue with that.” 

Stiles watches as Derek shrugs out of his jacket, setting it on the back of the desk chair. Then as Derek sits in the same chair and unties his shoes methodically, pulling them off and lining them up neatly beside his bag. It’s like watching a serial killer going home after a long day of murdering. 

“Can I ask you something?” Stiles prompts, sitting up in his bed all the way. Derek looks up from where he had been studiously examining the pattern in the carpet underfoot, an expectant look on his face. “What would your best guess be? As to where she is?” 

Derek stares at him for a long time. His gaze is even more unsettling than Stiles thinks that his own can be. When he finally does speak, his voice is low and thin, with the suggestion that he’d rather not have to answer this question. “I have no idea.”

“There’s no place she ever mentioned to you? Somewhere she said she’d like to go someday or…?”

“No.”

Stiles shakes his head. “I just find that hard to believe, considering how close you two are –“

“We’re really not that close.” 

“Uh,” Stiles cannot help the sarcastic scoff that comes out of his throat, “you’re on a road trip with the person you hate the most in this world, going who knows how far just to find her, and you’re going to sit there and say that you two aren’t really that close?” 

Derek stands up, and he looms. There has always been a looming quality to him, a gargoylish nature, of someone who exists only to be seen and never expects conversation, never expects to be questioned, never expects anyone to notice anything about them beyond the fact that they are strange and uncomfortable to look at. “Whether we’re close or not, it doesn’t matter. She’s the only family I have left.” 

Stiles feels chastised. Derek had barely said anything, anything at all, and it had felt like a slap in the face all the same. 

As he’s undoing his jeans, sliding them off his thighs and calves and folding them neatly on top of his bag, he does not even glance in Stiles’ direction. He pulls back the covers of his bed and sinks underneath them, to lie there on his back and stare at the ceiling. 

After a beat, he speaks again. “And you have never been the person I hate most in the world, Stiles.” 

Stiles looks away.

**

That night, Stiles dreams a familiar set of circumstances. He has had this dream on and off for the past few years, and has honestly chalked it up to either something that his consciousness brews up as a total summation of his subconscious thoughts, or as something his magic comes up with. It’s just flashing imagery, for the most part – no solid story, nothing for him to assign meaning to.

Sometimes he’s downing in the incoming tide, desperately trying to claw his way to the surface with his hands digging fruitlessly in the sand. Other times he’s in the forest, and it’s burning, all burning, smoke rising up to the sky like a cloud that he can never seem to get out of. Sometimes, like this time, it’s both. 

He wakes up sweaty and cold at the same time, shivering himself awake in an unfamiliar bed staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. It’s barely light out just yet, the day still gray and cold outside, but Derek is sitting up and awake, already showered, on his own bed, like he’s just been waiting for Stiles to wake up for some time. 

This, again, is gargoylish of him. 

“And people say I’m creepy,” he quips, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes with a frown. 

“I was just about to wake you up. Daylight’s burning.” 

“It cannot be burning, because it hasn’t even come yet,” Stiles is grumpy and exhausted, gesturing to the dark day outside, the sun still hiding. 

“Come on and get up,” he gestures, like he’s Stiles’ dad or something, and this also makes Stiles grumpy. Still, he gets up and grumbles something about alarm clocks and sunlight and beauty sleep, shuffling to the bathroom after picking up his bag to take along with him. 

The air is moist with steam, the shower still damp from Derek’s turn inside. There are a couple of jet black hairs in the shower drain which Stiles tries to ignore as he gets clean, and then he dresses methodically in the steam. In spite of what movies and television shows have always shown, Stiles has never really felt comfortable just stripping naked in front of other men or emerging all wet from the shower to get dressed right in front of them. Maybe if he were straight, he’d have no problem showing his bare ass to Derek Hale, but then again, still probably not. 

When he comes out all dressed and ready for the day, Derek is up and already at the door waiting for him, his bag nowhere to be seen, likely already in the car. 

“Ready?” Derek asks him – he’s holding out a pack of pop tarts he likely bought from the vending machines down the hall. Stiles is surprised by the gesture, so he takes them with genuine thanks, ripping at the packaging as they meander out to the car in the early morning sun. 

Inside, Derek adjusts his rear view mirror. “You still think we’re going in the right direction?”

It is impossible to imagine going any other direction than east, no matter how hard Stiles thinks about it. That is as much of a definitive as he’s ever going to get, so he nods his head. Derek starts driving, and Stiles thinks that he’s going to begin to hate this fucking car before the day is out. It’s foggy, the air still cold because the sun hasn’t warmed up the earth at all quite yet, and Stiles chews his pop tart silently, stuffing bites into his mouth one after the other. 

Derek is side-eying him again. “You had a bad dream last night.”

Stiles stops chewing. Then, he quickly starts up again before Derek notices. “You could tell?” 

“Yeah, your scent. Anxiety and confusion.” 

“That’s not creepy.” 

“Oh, and you’re so normal. Had any conversations with the dead, lately?”

Stiles shoves the last bite of his breakfast into his mouth and glowers, swiping angrily at the crumbs that have accumulated in his lap. As a matter of fact, his most recent sashay into the paranormal world was a nightmare, a literal nightmare, thanks very much, but he’s not about to give Derek the satisfaction of knowing he’s ever done that at all. “It was just a weird dream, that’s all. Being a witch, you know, sometimes they’re really mythic.” 

Stiles has had dreams about burning bodies and maggots and all kind of really hellish imagery. Still, there’s something about that dream in particular. The ocean sucking him in, the forest burning all around him, that always rattles him, no matter how many times he has it. There is more to it than what meets the eye, but Stiles cannot figure it out, and maybe that’s what gets to him most of all. 

Derek is silent for a long time. Miles go by, the car whizzing past big green directional signs and gas stations. 

When he does finally speak, he’s guarded, his voice cautious. “You mind if I ask what the dream is about?”

Stiles can smell the burning of the wood, here and now, can almost see the smoke rising in between the two of them. “I’d really rather not talk about it, actually.”

“Say no more,” Derek backs off, understanding the desperate need to not be needled and prodded at with words more than anyone else on earth. “I used to have really bad nightmares, too.”

This is a first. Stiles sits up in his seat a bit, adjusting his seatbelt so he can give Derek his full attention. All the years they’ve ever known one another, Derek has never once opened up – not about a single fucking thing, let alone something as personal as a recurring nightmare. 

“After the fire, you know,” he keeps his eyes trained on the road, not looking at Stiles, so it could almost be like he’s talking to himself. “It was hard to forget the screaming.” 

“Christ,” Stiles mutters, low. He can’t imagine. He cannot begin to fathom the horror of that situation, and when he tries, his mind aggressively shies away from it, because it’s so fucking awful. 

“I never told you this,” he starts, and oh this is about to be good, if the way his face looks like he’s being held at gun point and forced to speak this aloud is anything to go by. “…but a long time ago, I mentioned something about the nightmares offhand and you gave me a uh…a type of rock.” 

Stiles had forgotten about that, but the second Derek says it, he can see the stone perfectly in his mind, remembers the way it had looked in Derek’s palm when he handed it to him. “A river stone,” he says, quietly. 

“Right, the river stone, you called it,” his hands grip the wheel, hard. This is making him uncomfortable, Stiles can tell, but for whatever reason, he’s forcing himself to say it. “You told me to put it under my pillow, and I made fun of it to your face but uh. I did. And I never had the nightmare again.” 

“Rivers are always moving and going,” Stiles explains. “The rocks can help your mind to do the same, to sort of help you forget. Or, move on, or process things better.” 

“Yeah,” Derek agrees. “I remember you said that. I thought it was so stupid, like all magic. But that really…” he clears his throat, shakes his head. “You can’t know how much it helped. At that point, I hadn’t slept a full night in…years.”

“Oh.” See, in Stiles’ mind, he remembers Derek being a huge grump and a pain in the ass that day. He remembers him bitching about not having gotten enough sleep and citing something about terrible nightmares that Stiles immediately assumed were trauma related, and he remembers giving Derek one of his river rocks more off hand than anything else. He had thought that Derek would’ve casted it into the woods or even the waters from whence it came – which is likely why he completely forgot it even happened. This was a nothing occasion to Stiles, something to do and then immediately forget about. 

Apparently, for Derek, it was a hell of a lot more than that. 

“Ever since then you don’t get the nightmares, ever?”

Derek shakes his head. “Not even once. I still have that rock.” 

“Shit,” Stiles sinks deeper into his seat. He cannot begin to imagine what this all means. 

“So, I’m wondering why you don’t just river rock your own nightmares away.”

“Oh, Derek,” Stiles rolls his eyes and smiles at him, gently shaking his head. “So naïve, so silly. If I could, believe me, I would get rid of these fucking things in my head so fast – but my nightmares and even my dreams are a lot different than anyone else’s. No rock on earth could empty my brain of them.” Stiles has tried spells, and potions, and rocks, and crystals, and all manner of witchy whatever the hells that he could come up with, but nothing has ever, ever worked. 

When his mind decides to try and tell him something, then it will tell him, whether Stiles likes it or not. The problem is, with these ones, he has never been able to put his finger on what they’re saying to him. 

Derek is about to say something in response to that, but he never gets the chance – Stiles catches something out of the corner of his eye and shoots up on instinct, his hand reaching out to point before his brain has even caught up to the fact that he’s doing it, let alone why. He barks, “pull over,” and Derek slams on the brakes, sending them careening off to the side of the road.

Dust that had been kicked up from the tires screeching to a halt is floating in the air around them, and Stiles is stiff and still, his breaths going shallow. Whenever the feelings come to him as clear as this, they tend to shake him, a tremor rattling his hands and arms. 

“You’re shaking,” Derek assesses, and this does not please him. He sounds worried, like he thinks Stiles is about to go into shock or have a seizure. 

Neither of those things happen. Instead, Stiles points his shaking finger at what had caught his attention in the first place. “Here,” he says, “I know this place.” 

It’s a gas station. Not even a particularly interesting one. Just a little shack on the side of the road, two pumps, a convenience store with a glowing open sign in the window. It’s run down and dusty, clearly having been exposed to this desert climate for far longer than any place should be. 

Derek isn’t following. “You’ve been here before?”

“No,” he unbuckles his seatbelt and opens the door. Dust gets into his nostrils, his mouth, so he coughs and squints against it. “She has, though.” 

This, Derek follows just fine. He unbuckles quickly and follows Stiles’ lead, out of the car, onto the dirt. Stiles is still shaking, but he moves forward and pushes the door to the convenience store open. The bell overhead dings as the boys step inside – a few rows of chips and candy bars, Pepsi machines and glowing lights illuminating stacks of beers and energy drinks. 

Stiles walks up to the first thing that catches his eye. The gum rack. He feels Derek hot on his heels as he goes, as he reaches his hand out and feels along the piles of Orbit, bubblicious, Juicy Fruit. With a deep inhale, he bumps his fingers up against a tube of Mentos – and recoils, fast, like he’s been burned. 

A zap. A _do not touch_ sign hanging invisible right in front of his face. A warning. 

“What is it?” Derek demands. Behind them, a bored looking teenager managing the cash register peers at them like he’s about to hit the emergency button to get the cops down here because two freaks are causing a ruckus. 

Stiles looks at Derek and frowns. The tube of Mentos is taunting him, buzzing, almost glowing with a supernatural hum that Derek can’t seem to pick up on at all. “She does not want me to be here,” he informs Derek, who seems taken aback by the information. “I need to get the hell out of here,” he snaps, shouldering past Derek out into the open air where it’s less stifled, where the buzzing finally leaves him alone.

**

Over a grilled cheese and fries, Stiles gives Derek a look. “I need to reiterate how uncomfortable I am with trailing someone who very evidently does not want to be followed.”

Derek had ordered a club sandwich and has already inhaled half of it, eating more robotically than anything else. The drive from the tainted gas station had been silent and uncomfortable, but that is simply par for the course as far as the two of them are concerned. “How do you even know she’s the one who’s putting spells on everything? The last time I checked, she wasn’t exactly a master magician.” 

“These are not the works of a master magician,” he picks into his grilled cheese with his fingers, having only taken one or two bites of it at most. The shock he had received from the Mentos made his stomach queasy, the bitter orange-rind air in the gas station had wiped his appetite clean. “They’re basic – things I could do as Kindergartener.” 

“She doesn’t know any magic, easy or not.”

“Then she’s been doing her research.” 

“What makes you so sure?” He looks Stiles up and down, like he’s looking for the mark of the devil on him, or something. Or, trying to see what it is about him that makes him this way. “How could you possibly be sure she’s the one who doesn’t want us coming after her?” 

“I just know it, god dammit,” Stiles says this just a hair too loudly, so other people in the diner turn to look and stare at them. What a sight they must be. Lowering his voice, he palms his face and stares out the window, where the car sits in the sun, where the shadows of time’s arms cast across the ground. “Those spells are very specific. They weren’t put there to ward off anyone coming to find her, just anyone, not even you. They’re directed at me specifically.” 

Derek puts his sandwich half down. He runs a napkin over his mouth and his eyes are far away. “Why would she do that.” 

“Because she knew you would ask me for help, she…knew that you and I would be doing this. How could she know that?” She, for one, is not clairvoyant. Not even close. She’s just another dumb werewolf, just like Derek is. 

There is avoidance in Derek’s eyes, in his tone, in his posture, and this is the first moment that Stiles gets a feeling like there’s something he’s not being told. Like there is a big neon sign over their heads that tells him the truth, that says what’s really going on here, but Stiles can’t quite read it just yet. “I have no idea,” he says, and it falls flat. Derek is not a good liar. 

All the same, it’s a lie that Stiles doesn’t have time for. He crunches on another fry or two even though his body protests the food, just to get something into his system so he won’t starve later on. “I have to protest.” 

“Okay,” Derek looks at him again, that searching look, desperately trying to unravel the mystery that Stiles is. “You’ve protested.”

So, Stiles has said many times over that this is clearly a mission to find someone who does not want to be found. The reasons for that could be many – Stiles has always assumed Laura to be the one of the two remaining Hale children that has become well-adjusted even after the trauma. But maybe that’s not true, and maybe she’s running from Beacon Hills and from her own brother because all they do is remind her of what happened. Of everything she doesn’t have anymore. 

It’s not Stiles’ place. But Laura had not considered the fact, because she does not understand magic, that simply putting wards up would in and of itself lead Stiles and Derek straight to her. Magic leaves traces. It’s a bread crumb trail, and Stiles knows it, and Derek knows it too. This whole thing just got a hell of a lot easier. 

The waitress comes and drops the bill off, so Derek pays. Out they go, back to the car, onto the road again, in spite of Stiles’ knowing that it just might be wrong. There is something about this that is beginning to feel inevitable. Inescapable. 

When he pulls his tarot card out and sets it on the dash some two hours later, the time card comes up again, mocking him. Derek sees it and makes no comment. That night, in the darkness of another hotel off the side of the highway, he dreams of the forest burning again.

**

“I would really rather you didn’t do that,” Derek says, gruff, eyeballing the shit out of Stiles where he’s got his head out the window, letting the breeze bounce off his sunglasses and ruffle his hair to the point of no return. “You could lose your fucking head and then I’d have a real mess to clean up, and your friends would all say I did it on purpose.”

Stiles stays put for another ten seconds or so, feeling the sun on his skin and the wind through his hair, and then huffs a sigh and sits all the way back, slowly whirring the window back up. “I might just let you drive me into a road sign to decapitate me at this point.” 

“Bored?”

“Miserable,” he concedes with a sarcastic grin, running his hands up and down his face. “Maybe you’ll let me do some card tricks.” 

“I would also really rather you didn’t do that, either.” 

Stiles is already pulling his cards out from his bag, shuffling them lightning quick, even as Derek huffs a hugely put upon sigh and frowns out at the sunlight. “Just a couple won’t kill you. It’s fun.” 

“It certainly is not. It’s creepy bullshit.” 

“So say you,” he holds the cards out to Derek in a fan, waggling his eyebrows. “Pick a card, any card.” 

“No.”

“Pick a card, any card.” 

“Stiles, seriously.”

“Pick a card, any card.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Derek gives in. He reaches out and plucks a card out like he’s angry about it – glaring at the contents of it before huffing and stabbing it back into the deck. Stiles shuffles them up again, biting his lip as he works the cards over and over. It was the first thing he learned how to do, when he was a kid, so it comes as natural to him as walking. 

“Picture the card in your mind.”

“I’m picturing it, among other things.” 

“All right,” he leans back and finger guns out the windshield, to a sign that had only seconds earlier been advertising a fancy hotel coming up in twenty miles. “Is that your card?”

The sign has become an ad for the King of Hearts, red and ominous in the sunlight. Derek is mad about it, but he says yes, it sure is, and Stiles snaps his fingers – the card fades back into its original ad for free WiFi and a hot tub. “Isn’t that fun?” 

“How do you do that?” Derek asks – and Stiles is again surprised, by him. All the card tricks and all the spells and all the bullshit that Stiles has ever pulled on him before, Derek has never once demanded to know the exact metrics of it all. What the magic is, or how it works has never mattered to him. Derek uses Stiles’ magic to his own advantage, and only when he desperately needs it, nothing more, nothing less. 

Stiles shrugs. “That’s not a question I can really answer. I mean, how do you shift into a werewolf?”

He hadn’t been expecting an answer, but Derek provides one all the same. “By getting angry enough to do so.” It makes sense, but Stiles had thought it was more natural than that. As easy as winking or frowning, just a simple muscle movement – he never thought that maybe there were mental aspects to becoming a wolf. “Do you get angry when you do magic?” 

“Never,” he admits. “It just is. A part of me.” 

Derek says something else that Stiles had never expected. He says, “does it ever scare you?”

“Uh,” Stiles laughs, short and quick and surprised. 

“All that power inside you. Do you ever think it’s got a mind of its own?”

“It definitely does.”

“That doesn’t freak you out?” 

Stiles looks away. “I don’t usually linger on that long enough to allow it to freak me out. But I guess you’re saying that the wolf inside of you freaks you out.” 

Derek gets this odd look on his face – he smiles, all his teeth, his eyes scrunching at the corners with it. He is not smiling to be happy, definitely not, because he never is, so it’s off. Not quite right. “Oh, yes. It’s the thing about myself I hate the most.” 

Stiles can’t really imagine what that would be like; to have something inside of you, a part of you, an innate piece of who you are, and to absolutely despise everything about it. To think that it makes your life worse, to think that it seeks to do you harm more than it could ever benefit you. Stiles’ relationship with his magic has always been benign, because it’s…well, shit, Stiles isn’t sure how to explain it. It’s like the blood in his veins. It couldn’t be anything else aside from benign, because it keeps him alive, after all. 

Derek apparently does not see it that way. After all, the wolf is what got his entire family killed. 

“Well, I think it’s one of the best things about you,” Stiles says, and he means it. “It makes you strong and smart.” 

“It makes me angry and miserable, also,” his hands are gripping the steering wheel too hard again, and Stiles doesn’t know what else to say to that. He just leans back in his seat and fiddles with his cards some more, feeling the weight of them between his fingers like an old stuffed animal. A comfort object more than anything else.

**

“Has he done anything weird?” Scott demands over FaceTime that night, examining Stiles as best as he can through the shitty camera lens.

“He’s right here in this room with me,” he snarks, because he is – lying on his bed and flipping through the channels one by one, never stopping long enough to see what’s playing for more than a second or two. 

“That alone is weird enough,” Scott makes a face and appears to be trying to see as much of he can of the situation, even though all he can see is the ugly hotel bed spread and Stiles’ face, for the most part. “But has he really done anything weird? You can tell me.” 

“No,” and Stiles doesn’t only say that because Derek can hear it – he says it because it’s true. “No weirder than the usual Derek stuff.” 

“Pushing you into walls, demanding you do magic at his beck and call.” 

“None of that,” he snorts, and when he turns to see Derek’s reaction to this, Derek has none. He’s got his eyes transfixed on the TV like he’s entering the picture, becoming one with the screen, like in Poltergeist. It’s a funny image. “We’re just driving, for the most part. It’s mind numbingly boring, because Derek won’t stop at any of the cool road side attractions.”

“Because this isn’t a vacation,” Derek quips, and Stiles has heard that one before only a half dozen times. He wouldn’t pull over to buy fresh berries from a farm stand and he wouldn’t pull over to look at a really big ball of yarn, either. 

“Sounds like fun,” Scott narrows his eyes. “You know, if you want to come back and Derek is forcing you to go with him…”

Derek gets up off his own bed, abrupt, and then he’s right there, leaning into Stiles’ personal space so he can put his face into the camera and look at Scott for himself. Stiles yelps, scrambling a bit to try and get away from him, but it’s no use – there he is, right there, so Stiles can smell him. He smells like toothpaste and aftershave, and for the first time, Stiles thinks it’s…attractive. It’s a baffling thought, so he swallows and tries to forget it, as Derek opens his mouth to speak. “McCall, you are so fucking annoying.” 

“Oh, I am?” Scott scoffs, pointing to his chest, before pointing that same finger right into the camera. “You’re one to talk. I have half a mind to come down there –“

“You have no fucking idea where we even are.”

Stiles is still shrinking underneath Derek on the bed, as he leans over more, closer, so their bodies are touching. 

“Stiles will tell me.” 

“Stiles would,” Stiles starts, clearing his throat. Derek doesn’t move, not one inch, so they’re just as close as ever. “If only Stiles had any idea what the name of this place is. I think we’re in Nevada.” 

“You are _clairvoyant_ ,” Scott reminds him, angry and irritated. 

“I’m getting tired of having that thrown in my face at every turn, you know?” 

Derek finally moves, up and away, to go be his ball of anger and rage on the other side of the room. Stiles breathes in and then out, and he cannot imagine why Derek being that close to him just then made him so…shaken, almost – like something was happening that either shouldn’t have been or should’ve happened a long time ago. 

“Just keep me updated,” Scott says, and then he hangs up without another word, so Stiles knows that he’s mad, too. Derek is mad, muttering under his breath and flipping through the channels again maybe just for something to do with his hands, and Scott is mad all the way in California. Stiles is in the middle of it, chewing on his bottom lip and watching as Derek finally settles on a cooking show. 

Mushrooms are cooking in a pan with some white wine and garlic, while Derek stares and looks mad to see them there at all. 

“You know, you might try to get along with Scott some day.” 

“Why the fuck would I do that?” He hisses, narrowing his eyes at the woman on screen flipping the pan around and grinning at them. “He’s like an ant I never managed to crush under my shoe.” 

“Having a friend or two might help you with your mental issues.”

“Mental issues?” Derek manages to tear his eyes away from the mushrooms to glare in Stiles’ direction. “Because I must be crazy, having watched my family burn to death.” 

“Yeah, kinda,” he nods, a smile crossing his face before he can help it. It’s not that it’s funny, but then, maybe it sort of is in some sick and twisted way – that Derek would seriously think that it hasn’t taken a mental toll on him, even after all this time has passed. “You don’t really have anyone to talk to, and the one person you did have is missing. Scott is a good friend.” 

“My ass.”

“Okayyy,” Stiles draws it out and shifts in the bed, watching as onions get dumped into the pan as well, a spatula coming in to stir them around. “I’m also a pretty good friend.” 

Stiles expects another comment like _my ass_ , but instead, Derek just looks at him for a moment without saying anything. The pan sizzles like it’s there in the room with them, crackling with oil and heat, as they hold each other’s eye contact. Stiles thinks about how close Derek had been earlier, how it had felt wrong and right and wrong and then right again, and he is the first one to look away. He’s never the first one to look away. Not usually. 

“I know that,” Derek says, and Stiles looks at his phone and pretends to be answering a text because he’s uncomfortable. 

“Well, if you ever wanna talk.” 

“I do not want to talk.”

“Right.”

Derek looks at the screen of the television. He looks out the window at the moon overhead, at the floor, at Stiles, who’s not looking back at him. “Sometimes I get so miserable it’s like drowning.” 

Stiles looks at him. Puts his phone down on his chest and folds his hands over it, going silent and still, just to let Derek know that he’s listening. 

“Everyone thinks I’m this terrible piece of shit,” a sardonic smile is on his face, as he picks at a loose thread on the blanket underneath him. “Maybe I am.” 

“I don’t think that.”

“You and I have never gotten along,” he reminds Stiles, as if this is something that Stiles could ever forget about. 

“Yeah, but, so what? I’ve never walked around thinking oh, Derek Hale, what a piece of shit.” Which is true. Even at the peak of Stiles’ dislike for Derek, he has ever once thought something that terrible about him. Has he found Derek annoying, yes. Has he found Derek insufferable at times, yes. Has he thought that he and Derek have about as much in common as a snail and a lion, yes. 

But, so? Derek is a lot of things, not all of them very good, but he’s not a bad person. Stiles is sure of that. 

“Do you think I am a piece of shit?” Stiles presses, lifting a single eyebrow. 

“Of course not,” he snaps, like Stiles is idiotic for even suggesting it. “You’re here, aren’t you?” 

“Yes,” he agrees, somewhat mysteriously – he can tell he’s being mysterious, because Derek shoots him a look that always accompanies his general distaste for Stiles’ nonsense. “And so are you.” 

“That’s nothing.” 

“Really?” He sits up all the way, turning his body so he’s facing Derek’s side of the room full on, his hands in his lap. “You quite literally might end up going all over this country, looking for your sister, and you think just anybody would do that?”

Derek looks up at the ceiling, like having Stiles’ eyes directly on him is unsettling him, or something. “I don’t think just anybody would agree to come with me, either.” 

“So then it’s settled,” he crosses his arms over his chest and lifts a brow. “I’m not a piece of shit, and neither are you. I’m glad that’s out of the way, so we can stop treating each other like it.” 

It’s half a joke, and half not at the same time. Derek and Stiles have often tended to treat each other at least kind of like shit; but then there were always moments between them, like the river rock. Stiles hadn’t known how grand of a gesture it was, at the time, but still, he had done it. He has no idea why, not even now. 

“Maybe you could coach your friends to do the same,” he suggests, and Stiles sighs and rubs at his face again. Yeah, that’s really unlikely. Argent and Hale bad blood runs deep, and Scott…well. Scott is Scott. 

But this is the moment of the trip where an understanding is made. All the years Derek and Stiles spent dancing around one another, pretending the other doesn’t exist or just flat out being angry with them? They’re over. Done. 

They’re in this, now. It’s scary, but they’re here. It is what it is.

**

In the morning, Stiles again wakes up to Derek hovering over him. Fresh shaven, hair wet from the shower, fully dressed, coffee cup in hand. “You were having nightmares again,” Derek informs him with a deep frown on his face – he’s got bags under his eyes, that suggest he had woken up far earlier than he’d ever let Stiles know.

“Well, you snore, so we’re even,” Stiles grouses. He’s not exactly a peach in the morning, and after four straight mornings of dealing with it, Derek is set on dealing with it. He just blinks and watches as Stiles unfurls himself from the sheets, damp from his own sweat, and when he gets into the bathroom he closes the door hard behind himself. 

In the mirror, he sees how pale he is. The dream was the worst it’s ever been – the smoke was so thick he was choking on it, the water so high he could never dream to ever claw his way back onto the beach. He runs his hands down his face and brushes his teeth, keeping his eyes on himself in the mirror, tracing the contours of the purple bags under his eyes, the glazed set to them, the way he thinks that if those dreams don’t stop he’s going to go nuts on this fucking trip. 

Outside in the early morning sun, Derek is hovering, looking over the railing down into the parking lot below. “Where the hell are we?” Stiles asks him, dropping his bag down onto the ground between them so he can stand there and look at the view himself. Just a parking lot, a small town, some woods. Nothing to give it any personality or to assign a name to it. 

“You’re the clairvoyant one.” 

“Oh, haha,” he snorts. Then, he puts his two index fingers to his temples and squeezes his eyes shut, makes an eerie noise from the back of his throat. 

“Stop fucking with me,” Derek snaps, but there’s a smile in his tone. 

“The voices are speaking to me,” he quips, and then pops his eyes open to find Derek giving him a very flat look – not angry, or annoyed. Just…flat. It’s the best he could hope for. “Colorado, baby.” 

“Colorado,” Derek repeats, and then looks out across the land ahead of them. “Colorado sounds right. So Colorado it is.” 

Colorado it is. 

“Do you really have voices in your head?” Derek asks, and the fact that he says it so genuinely, an edge of concern to his tone, has Stiles bursting out laughing. He doesn’t answer, just picks his bag up and gestures towards the stairs, that will take them down to the lot and to the car, their prison cell for the foreseeable future. 

If Stiles did have voices in his head, it sure would explain a lot. As it is, it’s mostly just him in there. 

Stiles’ guess of Colorado turns out to be true – all the signs around them indicate as such, and when they get out onto the highway, Stiles’ recognizes the signs of it all around them. The forests and the mountains, all indicators of somewhere deep in middle America, far from the coast that Derek and Stiles are far more acquainted with. 

At one point, Stiles notices something on fire, not that far away from the road. The smoke is billowing up, the smell of it seeping in through the air conditioning vents in the car – Stiles sits up and looks to see what it is that’s gone up. As far as he can tell, it’s just a forest fire, but then, there doesn’t seem to be anyone doing anything about it. People are driving by without a second glance, no firefighters, nothing. Just a fire burning in the forest in the middle of nowhere, with no one there to put it out. 

Derek notices him looking, might even be able to smell his concern. “That’s not a forest fire,” he says, and Stiles turns to look at him. “They call it a controlled burn. If there’s parts of the forest that are at a high risk of starting a wildfire, that could spread to other more healthy parts, they burn it before it gets a chance to go up by itself.” 

Stiles looks at the flames again, the plume of smoke. It spreads out into the road, so Derek drives right through a wall of smoke that goes wispy as they plow into it, and long after it’s gone in the rear view mirror, the smell of the smoke the only evidence that it had happened at all, Stiles cannot stop thinking about it. 

To burn parts of something to keep it alive. He has never heard of something like that.

**

At a McDonald’s some four hours later, Stiles is standing in front of the double doors leading into the lobby where people are eating and an employee is dutifully sweeping the floor – his arms crossed over his chest, a frown deep in his face. Derek is standing right next to him, looking between the doors and Stiles, like he’s waiting for Stiles to hurry up and do something. When a full minute goes by without Stiles moving or talking, Derek clears his throat.

“Stiles,” he says. Stiles blinks and stares at the door handle some more. 

“I can’t go in there.”

“Because you don’t like the food.”

“Because I can’t,” he can feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up. “Because she doesn’t want me in there.” 

Derek looks inside, where it’s all yellow and bright, the smell of fried food permeating everything around them, and makes a face, like it’s silly. Because it is really, really silly. “Laura doesn’t usually eat fast food.” 

“Regardless,” Stiles finally tears his eyes away and starts making his way back to the car, his legs shaky, his head cloudy, his eyes drooping from exhaustion. “She was here, let’s go.” 

Derek catches up to him easily, and as they walk across the parking lot, Stiles feels Derek’s eyes on him like lasers. As though he’s trying to see through Stiles, right to the center of him, to figure him out. Derek has always looked at Stiles like a math problem he couldn’t quite solve. “You don’t look so good.” 

Stiles pulls open the passenger door and practically falls into his seat, collapsing like sticks into the leather. He slams the door behind him so he smells Derek and himself and not the sickly sweet scent of bad magic being used against him. 

When Derek is inside his half of the car, Stiles gives an answer to that. “I’m not doing terribly good, you’re right. The kind of magic she’s using, it’s meant to hurt me.” 

This, for whatever reason, gives Derek some alarm. He repeats that back to Stiles, “hurt you?”, like he simply cannot believe it. “Like, physically harm you?”

Stiles takes in three deep breaths, while Derek starts the car. It is right on time for Stiles to roll down his window and retch out the side of it, nothing but stomach bile coming up because Stiles couldn’t bring himself to eat this morning, barely had two sips of his coffee.

“Christ,” Derek is alarmed some more. He turns on the air conditioning because he sees that Stiles is sweaty and pale and sick looking. 

He pulls himself back into the car all the way and wipes at his mouth, weak. “It’s meant to ward me off, so it has side effects to keep me from coming back for more. She didn’t account for the fact that I’m a masochist.” 

Derek is quiet and does not start driving, not for a full five minutes. It’s just the two of them sitting in the AC, Stiles leaning back into his seat with his eyes closed sucking in deep breaths, willing himself to not puke again, Derek sitting with his eyes staring dead ahead at the McDonald’s. He may be imagining his sister coming here to eat French fries, to curse the place to keep himself and Stiles away, and he may be wondering why she would do this. 

Or, as Stiles has begun to suspect more and more as the days have gone on, he knows exactly why she would do this but doesn’t want to Stiles to know that. 

“Can you drive away from here?” He snipes, putting his hands over his face. “I can’t stand it anymore.” 

Not needing to be asked twice, Derek puts it into drive and starts back toward the highway from whence they came, his blinker clicking in the silence. “Are you okay?”

Stiles snorts. He doesn’t even know where to begin with that question. “I’ll be fine, it’s just…she really wanted to hurt me.” 

“I find that hard to believe,” Derek says as they climb up the ramp to the open road, and Stiles snorts. Well, of course he would find it hard to believe his sister would ever do anything to hurt someone else. It’s entirely plausible that she was just ignorant of just how much this kind of magic can fuck with him, but more likely, she did want to hurt him. There is malintent in these spells, Stiles can feel it. Out of character as it may seem, it was done purposefully. 

“The thing I can’t figure out is why,” he goes on as if Derek hadn’t said that at all. “I’ve never done anything to her.” 

Silence. Derek gripping the wheel. The road stretched in front of them, endless. Stiles is used to this scene, so he makes no more commentary. He just enjoys the freedom of air not tainted by malicious magic and rubs at his forehead a bit, shaking his head as it finally clears up. 

“The less you say,” Stiles starts, pulling out his deck of tarot cards. He shuffles, shuffles, ends up with the time card once more. “…the more I start to think there’s something you’re neglecting to tell me.” 

Derek sees the time card and his lips part, like he cannot believe he’s seeing it again, can’t believe it’s happening all over again, can’t believe Stiles just said what he said. “I’m not much for keeping secrets,” is his evasive, gruff response. 

“Yes you are.”

“I don’t –“

“I know,” he points to his temple. “I just know. It’s your secret to keep. But I’m the one who’s suffering for it.” 

Up in the sky, Stiles sees the arms of another clock ticking, ticking, and he frowns and wishes he could make sense of it. He acts like he knows, but the truth is, it’s as much a mystery to him as where Laura has gone. 

At another hotel in another town in the middle of nowhere, Derek sits on his bed and looks up at the ceiling. He looks like he’s thinking about something very seriously, gritting his teeth so hard his jaw ticks, while Stiles clicks through the channels on the television. Derek doesn’t even glance at the screen, not once. Stiles feels better since the attack on his well being at McDonald’s, but he can still feel the itch of bad magic clawing at his throat like it wants to get out of him. Really, he doesn’t have it in him to have another face off with Derek Hale. 

All he wants to do is make it through one night of sleep without the nightmare. Without the drowning, the clawing of his nails in the sand, the inescapable heat and smoke from the flames licking at his skin. He doesn’t notice it when he dozes off with all his clothes still on, the television still playing, the lights still on. 

Before he knows it, he’s back in the water. It seems to go on forever, the drowning. 

Instead of waking up in a cold sweat to the morning sun creeping through the blinds, Derek sitting on the opposite bed waiting for him, he wakes up to hands shaking him, a body over his, Derek’s voice. 

“You’re screaming,” Derek informs him, as Stiles startles awake and blinks furiously in surprise. “Relax, it’s just me.” 

“Okay,” Stiles rasps, sucking in a deep breath. That one was bad, he thinks, bringing a hand up to rub at his eyes. That was really bad, that one felt real, more real than any of the others, like the fire was in this room, right here, with him. Is still here, right now. 

Derek is still hovering over him. He’s got his hands on Stiles’ body, and where he touches, it feels hot. “Tell me what that dream is about,” he commands, and Stiles shrinks back into his pillow, but says nothing. For whatever reason, he does not want Derek to know. 

When the silence goes on too long, with Derek’s eyes on him in the dark, Derek frowns. That’s all Stiles can make out on his face with the limited amount of light in this room.

“Then, let me guess,” he snaps, like he’s angry, so angry, angry enough that Stiles tries to press himself deeper into his mattress just to get away from him. “You’re drowning in an ocean surrounded by fire, in a forest you can never swim to no matter what you do.”

Stiles is dumbfounded. He opens his mouth to say no, or even to agree, but his voice is lost. He just opens and closes, opens and closes, while Derek stares at him from above, his eyes hard. “What, are you in my head, now?”

Derek smiles at him. It’s the most insane, unhinged, out of character, fucking psychotic thing that Stiles has ever seen in his entire life. This entire trip, maybe the entire time they have known one another, Derek has never fucking smiled. Not once. Not once. Especially not like this, like it’s vindictive somehow, like it’s revenge for something, like he’s finally giving Stiles exactly what he deserves. “Aren’t I?”

“I –“ Stiles is struck. Shook, perhaps. 

Before he can say anything else, think of anything else, do anything else, Derek is leaning forward and doing the single most unthinkable thing he could possibly fucking do. He pulls his body down so it’s right on top of Stiles’, the touch, the burn, and he kisses Stiles on the mouth. Stiles has this split second of _wrong, stop, don’t want, hate_ , but it’s gone as soon as it comes, washed away, drowned in an ocean of _yes, want, crave, need_. 

It’s instantaneous. One moment they are fighting, in a McDonald’s parking lot where Stiles pukes and accuses Derek of being a liar, and the next they are here in a bed in the middle of nowhere, kissing one another. What’s most insane about it, is that Stiles spares not much of a thought to why, or how. 

They kiss. Stiles feels it when Derek puts his hands on Stiles’ chest, his face, his neck, the way one feels the heat when they reach out to touch a lit burner on the stove. It’s on fire, the bed. The room. The hotel. 

It is frantic and thoughtless as they pull clothes off of one another – Stiles’ white undershirt tossed aside, Derek’s boxers sliding off of his legs like they were never there are at all – and the next thing either of them know, they are naked in bed, touching each other. Derek is big and rough with Stiles, pulling and pushing him this way and that, and if Stiles had ever in his life given any thought to the way he might think Derek would be in bed, this is pretty much it.

When he wraps his hand around Stiles’ very alert and ready cock, Stiles thinks he might pass out. The pleasure is all-encompassing and immediate. Like the touch alone is enough to make him orgasm. Obviously, it isn’t, so Derek strokes him, viciously. His hand is dry and it hurts, the friction, the pull, but Stiles doesn’t care. He cannot bring himself to ask Derek to stop, not even to lick his hand or spit or get lube – nothing is worth losing the touch even for one millisecond. 

Stiles comes with his back arched, a moan so disgusting it’s embarrassing but he doesn’t care. It’s all over Derek’s hand. Stiles pants and mutters an expletive, but before he can come down from the high, Derek is actually speaking to him. It has been silent this entire time, save for their hurried pants and grunts and Stiles’ nasty sex noises, so it’s jarring to hear Derek’s voice. 

“I need you to get me off,” he growls, his voice there in Stiles’ ear. Right there. He bites Stiles’ ear and Stiles jerks in surprise, a hushed moan spilling out from between his teeth before he can help it. 

He has this passing thought, like, this is fucking insane, but he reaches his hand out and paws around for Derek’s erection anyway; like it being completely bonkers isn’t really relevant, anyway, even though it absolutely is. 

He gets his hand on it and licks his lips, daring himself to look right up at Derek as he does so. This is sick. Stiles is enjoying every fucking second of it, watching Derek’s usually closed off, barricaded face fall apart right in front of his eyes. Stiles has had lots of sex, actually, tons of it, because he’s good looking and frequents bars and gets bored of people quickly – this is something that possibly would surprise Derek if he knew, so it makes sense that he seems baffled that Stiles could be so good at giving handjobs. 

Derek comes even faster than Stiles had, on a grunt that’s so, like, manly and tough and sexy in ten different ways, Stiles swears he could get hard and come again, if he really wanted to. 

But once it’s over, Derek is off of him. Flipping over onto the other side of Stiles’ queen sized bed, Derek’s own bed sitting neglected and forlorn across the room. He lies there, panting up at the ceiling, covered in both his own and Stiles’ come, and doesn’t say a fucking word.

Stiles clears his throat and starts to say, “so,” but Derek cuts him off. 

“Not a word,” he snaps, and he sounds angry. “Don’t say a fucking word.” 

Stiles doesn’t. When he falls asleep, exhausted from the orgasm, he doesn’t dream at all.

**

In the morning, like every other morning, Derek is sitting there on the opposite bed, waiting for Stiles to wake up. He blinks at Stiles when he sits up, his bag already packed, already showered, ready to go. It’s like nothing, nothing at all, had happened.

“Daylight’s burning,” he says. Stiles gets up and rubs at his face, feeling fucking nuts. When he goes into the bathroom he asks himself if that was some weird dream he had, the two of them going at it like starving people in the desert. It must have been, because when he emerges all showered and fresh, Derek just grabs both of their bags and heads for the car, leaving Stiles standing there blinking at his retreating back. 

But it couldn’t have been, Stiles reasons, as they pull away from the hotel and get back onto the dreaded highway. Stiles’ dreams are not that vivid, and even if they were…uh, he wouldn’t dream about that. As improbable as it seems now in the harsh light of day, Stiles knows that it happened. 

He is certain. 

“So,” he starts, fiddling with his seatbelt. “Um.”

Derek doesn’t even look at him. 

Stiles clears his throat and shifts, squirms more like, in his seat. This is the most uncomfortable he has ever been in his life. “Weird night.” 

Again, Stiles is met with silence. Derek is doing that thing he does where he grips the steering wheel so hard it looks as though it might crack apart, his jaw set tight, his eyes dead ahead. 

“Um…” Stiles cannot just sit here in silence, he cannot fucking do it. He has to fill the void with something, otherwise, he’s going to go insane – but he doesn’t know what to say. So he more or less just vomits up the very first thing that comes to mind, which so happens to be, “you are, like, insanely fit, which I know is sort of the point of being a werewolf, but, I never thought it would be like that, like –“

“I will pay you to stop talking.” 

Stiles’ face goes red and he looks away, out the window. He doesn’t know where they are, and frankly, he can’t find it in him to care right now.

“So, we messed around,” Derek shrugs, like it’s nothing to him. “It’s not like we got married.” 

This is just another bizarre thing to add to the list, so Stiles gets shocked and then quickly isn’t anymore, pressing his lips down into a firm line and glaring out at the morning sunshine. Okay, so it’s like that. Derek is a horny werewolf and Stiles is a huge slut, so of course they fooled around. Maybe it really is that simple, after all, even in spite of the fact that up until very, very recently, they could barely stand one another. Could barely be in the same room together, let alone kiss and jerk each other off. 

“And there are more important things going on. Remember?”

Stiles had almost forgotten the entire reason they were out here to begin with, actually. Here, on the highway, hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their shared home, trapped in a car together. There are questions bubbling up inside of Stiles, so many he might go completely batshit if he doesn’t get answers to them, but Derek is stubborn and his heels have dug in. He does not want to talk about it. He is happy to pretend it did not happen. Fine. 

Stiles is stubborn, too. 

They go to a diner off the highway that burns Stiles’ hand when he tries to touch the side of it, and know that they are still on the right path. Stiles pukes in a truck stop parking lot somewhere in Kansas after eating too much in the restaurant. They stop at a Hotel for the night and they don’t say anything to one another, don’t even turn on the television. They just go right to bed with the lights off, and Stiles has his nightmare again, and when he wakes up he wonders why it just…stopped, after he and Derek touched one another. 

If it means anything. Why Derek knows what his nightmares are of. If he’s ever going to stop pulling the time card out of his deck. If Laura knew what she was doing when she disappeared, if she knew Stiles would be here, why she knew that, why Derek won’t even look him in the eyes anymore, or speak to him, or anything. 

In Missouri, at the Holiday Inn room 313, Stiles pounces on Derek the second the door slams shut behind them. Derek has barely got the bags set down when Stiles starts shouting at him. 

“You cannot play mind games with me, buddy,” he hisses, so Derek drops the bags and turns to look at him, eyes meeting for the first time in two days. “You think I’m not better at it than you? I’m the clairvoyant one, I’m the spin master! You and I both know we didn’t just, just, out of nowhere fuck around!” 

Derek just stands there. 

“You’re messing with me. This entire trip has been you fucking with me, and you’re fucking with the wrong person,” he steps closer, closer still, pointing a long finger right at Derek’s face. “You think I can’t figure this all out? I know everything, asshole.” 

These are the rantings of someone pushed to their breaking point. Anyone, even emotionally constipated Derek Hale, could see that. Either way, Stiles keeps talking. 

“I want to know what’s going on, I want to know right now, or I’m done! I’ll fucking leave you out here, Derek Hale!” 

Derek heaves in this great, big, long suffering sigh. Like he’s being put through some deep torment, like he’s suffering in hell, like he’s at his own breaking point just like Stiles is. He says, “well, do you really want to talk about it, or do you just want to do it again?” 

“Uh!” Stiles shrieks, this, practically, he’s so fucking shocked. His jaw hangs open and his body locks down, and he realizes that he and Derek are only inches apart. Out of nowhere, they are practically touching. Again, they’re inches away. Again, they’re looking one another in the eyes.

In less than a second, they’re on top of one another. Their limbs melt together into one disgusting unit, as they tangle up, kissing and groping and clothes falling off. By the time they’re on one of the beds together, Stiles is down to just his socks and shoes, straddling Derek’s mid section as they chew each other’s faces off, heedless to whether or not the curtains are even drawn back to hide this peep show from any passing children down below on the highway. 

Stiles only has the upper hand for ten seconds before he’s being flipped over, before Derek is climbing right on top of him, overpowering him, he’s so fucking huge and strong. Which is Stiles’ type and always has been, but it boggles his mind he’s never realized that Derek was his type before. Why would he? He fucking hates the guy. 

Hated? Fuck.

Derek only has his boxers on. He puts his hands on Stiles, cups Stiles’ drawn up sac, rubs at Stiles’ cock head until precome oozes out, and Stiles swears. He sits up and watches, wants to see Derek’s hands touching him, wants to look at Derek’s face, wants to…he just _wants_. Derek meets his eyes.

It’s the craziest fucking thing, and it always has been, the way that Derek looks at Stiles. There is no name for it, not any word in any language. 

Derek flips Stiles over again, so he flops down on his belly like a fish out of water. Then, he hooks his hands underneath either of Stiles’ legs, so he can pull him up onto his knees. It occurs to Stiles then that they are going to fuck, like for real, seriously, and he goes all batty as he ducks his head into the crook of his elbow and asks himself if he should stop Derek from doing this. 

There are a million reasons why he should, and those are just the ones that Stiles could come up with off the top of his head. This is not something that should happen. There is something about fucking Derek Hale that feels like a seal, like something will be broken the second he does.

But, all logic goes out the window when Derek parts Stiles’ ass with his hands and puts his face in between – one swipe with his tongue is all it takes, and Stiles forgets. He goes lax, like water, his body limp to the pleasure. “Oh, my god,” he says, voice muffled by the pillow and his arm because he can’t bring it in himself to lift his face up. 

Derek shaves every now and again and actually had this morning, so it’s just smooth skin against Stiles’ smooth skin, as the torture continues. Derek pulls away, gently pushes one finger in – it slides, with the help of Derek’s saliva. “You taste like magic,” he says. 

And in the past he might have said it like it were a bad thing, because to wolves all magic is bad, evil, the worst fucking thing in the world. But now, he doesn’t say it like that at all. Not at all. 

There is a reverence in his tone that Stiles has never heard before. 

A second finger pushes in and Stiles tries his best to relax, to lean into the fingers. “I’m good,” he says, even though he certainly isn’t. “Just – come on.” 

Derek spends just a couple more seconds pushing those two fingers in and out, and then just as quickly as he takes them out, Stiles feels the hard, firm head of him pushing. The initial reaction to a foreign object is to resist it, so Stiles has to let his body go lax deliberately. 

When Derek pushes in, just the head, it hurts. Two fingers and Derek’s spit was not nearly enough, and it is really, really showing right now. He makes a noise and grits his teeth, so Derek stops and puts his hands on Stiles’ back, but he doesn’t say anything. They just stay like that, suspended in time, until Stiles can feel himself getting used to it. Then, Derek pushes in more. More. All the way. Until he’s buried as deep as he can be, panting, gripping onto Stiles’ hips so hard it is clear that they will be bruised in the morning. 

Then, one slide out, back in. Again. Stiles has this fleeting thought, that he’s being fucked by Derek Hale, right now, that if he told Scott, Scott would be on the next flight to Missouri to beat down that door with his body, to go insane, to accuse Derek of being a sick pervert, because obviously that’s what this all is. There is no other reason why Derek and Stiles would be doing this. 

After Stiles has been properly adjusted to Derek’s length, the gentle stuff is over. Derek is all hard edges and anger and violence, so it comes as no surprise to Stiles when he digs his fingers into Stiles’ skin and starts to pound him. It is easily, hands down, the hardest that Stiles has ever been fucked in his entire life. It feels like the bed is going to fall apart. Stiles is incoherent, the sounds he’s making all blending into one another – his cock bouncing with the force of the fucking, the sound of skin smacking skin, again and again. 

Stiles is pretty dirty. He likes big guys that hold him down and hurt him a little bit, and he’s no stranger to rough sex at all. But this is….something else. This is like porn. Who would’ve thought Derek would be good at sex? Christ, Stiles hadn’t even known he was into men. 

When he comes, it’s with a high pitched, breathy cry. His body tightens and releases hard and fast, so Stiles gets whiplash and feels woozy, even as Derek keeps fucking him. At one point, Stiles swears to god, Derek slaps Stiles on the ass. It’s out of body, it seriously is. 

Derek finishes. He buries himself all the way inside and comes, so Stiles feels it – there’s something weird about it, too, the way Derek holds onto Stiles’ hips to hold him in place as he finishes, like if even one drop manages to escape, he’ll not be very happy about it. Weird is one word, but Stiles supposes hot would be another. 

Derek pulls himself out and, just like last time, flops himself down onto the bed right beside Stiles’ body. Stiles lays down on his side, facing Derek, looking right at him. He opens his mouth and only manages to get as far as, “so that was –“

…before Derek stops him. “Go to sleep,” he interrupts, voice gruff. “Just go to sleep, Stiles.” 

Stiles does. And just like last time, the nightmare does not come.


	2. Kentucky Fried Stabbing

The morning light is harsh and offensive the next day. It seems to know every single thing that happened in the Holiday Inn room 313 last night, and is mocking him for it. Stiles puts on his sunglasses and ignores the way that he can’t even look at his own reflection in the glass of the ground level hotel window behind him. Truth be told, there is a part of him that is ashamed of his behavior these past couple of nights. 

Yes, he hooks up with random guys from the bars all the time. But this is not a random guy that he will never see again and has absolutely no obligations to. This is Derek Hale. This guy is part of his life, whether Stiles likes it or not. Stiles can’t just never call again and be rid of him like all the rest. 

Worst of all is that Stiles doesn’t even want to be rid of Derek. It’s not a feeling he’s familiar with as far as that guy is concerned, because even just a week ago, Stiles would have been beyond thrilled at the prospect of washing his hands of the other man for fucking good. 

“You ready to go?” Derek appears, a frown on his face as he juts his chin in the direction of the car. “We’re burning daylight.” He talks gruff, like he has not a care in the world, like he didn’t make Stiles come so hard he saw stars just eight short hours earlier. 

“Sure,” Stiles plays along. He gets in the car and buckles his seatbelt per Derek’s wishes, and he keeps his eyes on the road. They’ll be out of Missouri before the day is over, heading either into Illinois or Kentucky depending on where the trail takes them this time, and in a way, it’s almost like they could leave everything that happened in Missouri behind the second they cross over a state line. It would be easy to do just that, to seal it all off like a hidden room, like it never was at all. 

They drive in silence for two hours. That’s how long Stiles makes it before he cracks like an egg. “You know, I’ve never been this far East.” 

Derek doesn’t look at him. This is his automatic setting after they fool around, Stiles has noticed. The ominous silent treatment. 

“It would be cool if we went through Chicago,” he goes on, watching the road signs pass him by. He thinks Derek is speeding, as though he genuinely believes he could outdrive this conversation. “Not that we’re on a vacation or anything, but even just driving through would be pretty neat. You know, I’ve always wanted to come to this part of the country, but flying makes me nervous and driving takes so long, so –“ 

“If your goal is to annoy me to death, it’s working.” 

Stiles is offended. These types of things from Derek Hale’s mouth are a dime a dozen, but something about him having the stones to say that kind of shit to Stiles after Stiles let him do all those things to him last night really rubs him the wrong fucking way. 

He takes his sunglasses off, so Derek can tell how serious he is. “You don’t get to be inside of me one second and then treat me like garbage the next.” 

Derek does that thing he always does whenever Stiles brings up the sex – he sucks in this huge, all suffering breath, and then releases it in a miserably slow sigh. As though Stiles even mentioning it is a burden to him, somehow. “I thought we agreed not to discuss that.” 

“Um, what?” 

“I said –“ 

“Who is this, _we_?” 

“You and me.” 

“No, no,” Stiles tucks his glasses into the front pocket of his t-shirt, shaking his head, “when you say _we_ , you mean the royal we. Like the me, myself, and I _we_ , where all three of them are _you_. I never agreed to fuck you and then act like it didn’t happen, holy shit. That’s your prerogative, not mine, not even close.” 

“Like I said before, it’s not like we got married.” 

Stiles turns his body in his seat as much as he can – when the seatbelt restricts him, he unbuckles it like he’s angry with it, tossing it over his shoulder. “No, you just fucked me into next year and then cuddled with me all night, no big fucking deal!” 

“Put your seatbelt back on.” 

“How did you know what my nightmares are of?” Stiles’ voice is suddenly booming in the small space, so loud it’s a wonder Derek isn’t wincing. “Do I talk in my sleep? Huh? How could you possibly know that!” 

“Stiles,” Derek’s voice is low, basement low, dirt earth low. “Put on your seatbelt.” 

“Forget it,” Stiles snaps, crossing his arms over his chest and turning away to face forward, where the highway looms on and on, forever, never-ending, the way this entire trip is starting to feel. “Don’t come onto me tonight expecting anything, because I’m not giving in to –“ 

Derek pulls over. He hits the brakes and careens to the side of the road, so Stiles bumps against the side of the car after losing his balance in the seat. Without a word, Derek puts the car in park, reaches over with one hand to push Stiles back against the seat, holding him in place with a firm grip. It’s warm, almost too warm, the way his touch always is. 

His other hand reaches across Stiles and pulls the seatbelt in question over Stiles’ chest and body, buckling it in. 

“I don’t need your head going through the fucking windshield,” he barks. Then, he’s driving again, nonchalant, like he could honestly care less. Stiles wonders if he wants Stiles buckled in because the bloody mess his death would make would be a headache and an annoying bill to pay, or if he wants Stiles buckled in because he gives a shit about whether or not Stiles goes through the windshield at all. 

It’s insane, but Stiles honestly doesn’t know. 

“Just forget it,” Stiles repeats, glaring out the window. “It’s obvious you’re not interested in having a conversation with me about it, so just forget it.” 

Unfortunately, this pleases Derek more than Stiles would like for it to. He would be gleeful to never have to speak about anything. Nothing would thrill him more than Stiles’ complete silence. Nothing would make him happier than to not be asked a single question, to not hear Stiles’ voice again, to not be in this car with him at all. He’s such a fucking asshole. 

Stiles isn’t actually all that great at the silent treatment, nowhere near the champion of it that Derek is. So, instead of keeping that thought to himself, Stiles can’t help but speak it. “You are such a fucking asshole,” he accuses, still glowering out at the road. 

“I know that,” he snaps, and Stiles closes his mouth and swears he doesn’t feel bad for Derek, refuses to empathize, absolutely will not let that make him feel guilty. 

Of course Derek Hale knows he’s an asshole. Everyone treats him like he is, and he acts like he is only because it is what people expect of him. Stiles swears he won’t be forced to feel bad. He won’t. 

“I won’t sit here in this silence,” he shouts, leaning forward to turn on the radio. It’s the first time either of them have reached out to touch the stupid thing since the trip even began, if one could believe that. It is odd to hear it now, the fizzle as Stiles tunes and tries to find a local station. God only knows what kind of music Missourians request to hear, but for the love of all that it is holy, it must be better than the sound of Derek’s resolute silence. 

He never gets to find a working radio station. Derek reaches out and shuts the thing off before anything of substance makes its way over the radio waves. Stiles can’t even protest, because then, Derek is speaking. “You want me to sit here and gab about my feelings with you, like I’m sixteen years old.” 

Sixteen year old Derek is a person that Stiles wishes he ever got to meet. Stiles has seen the pictures in the Beacon Hills High School hallway, of Derek as a teenager smiling and looking so normal it is no surprise no one ever found out he was a werewolf. That person is probably dead. 

“Uh, or I want you to have, like, a rational _reaction_. Or any fucking reaction! You and I,” he points in between the two of them, back and forth, “we do not know one another. What we do know of one another, we do not like. So, why are we doing this?”

“Doing what?”

“Are you going to make me say it loud _again_?”

Derek’s jaw works. He is miserable to be sitting there, trapped in this car with Stiles, no where to hide, no where to run away, no woods to vanish into. He sits there and stews, and not a word comes out of his mouth. Stiles is sick to death, like physically ill for real, of having to pull this man’s teeth to get him to say anything coming even remotely close to the truth or a real fucking emotional proclamation, so he decides then and there that he just won’t anymore. 

“Whatever,” he hisses. He pulls his tarot deck out and fingers along the blunt edges, his comfort object, his fidget spinner. With a flourish, he shuffles and pulls out one card, flipping it face up on the dashboard. 

Time, again. It makes him so angry to see the arms of the clock sitting there leering at him, that he rips it up. Pulls it apart, destroys it, rolls down the window and watches as the pieces scatter in the wind, while Derek sees all of this out of the corner of his eye and probably wonders if Stiles is finally going full looney toons, like everyone in town says he is. 

Once the last remnants of the card are gone in the wind, Stiles rolls up his window and sucks in a big sigh. Then, he shuffles, again, and pulls out one single card. 

Time. There is only one card each per deck, and Stiles had just destroyed this card, it is in pieces on the highway – yet, here those clock arms sit in front of him, as though nothing had happened. This is the universe speaking directly to him, telling him _do not ignore this, don’t you dare fucking ignore this_ , but the problem is, he cannot for the life of him figure out what this card means. All the years he has spent learning these cards inside and out, all their variations and their omens and what have you, he has never been this baffled by a card’s mystery. Especially not one that the fates will not let him look away from. 

Derek sees it, and he is freaked out. Stiles can tell in the way he shifts in his seat and keeps glancing at it like he’s making sure it’s really there at all. Magic freaks the hell out of wolves more than most other species, because they’re all logic and action – the mystery of magic gives them the absolute creeps. All the more reason for Derek to not want anything to do with Stiles, but here they are. 

“I am in an hour glass,” Stiles says, mostly to himself, as he frowns out the window at the sun on the horizon. Sand is pouring and he’s running out of time. But for what, he does not know. 

“All that stuff is hocus pocus.” 

“You’d like to think so.” Derek would sleep better at night, if he really believed magic were not real. “I’m not talking to you, anyway.”

Derek side-eyes him again, as though he knows good and well that Stiles is no good at not talking, and that irritates Stiles enough to make good on his promise for at least a couple of hours. 

They drive. Derek is sullen and silent, a frown etched into his face like he’s carved out of marble. Stiles is thoughtful and slightly panicked, refusing to look at his tarot cards again, not even once. There are so many things that Stiles does not know, and something, the voices in his head or his magic itself, tells him that the key to all of them is somehow, someway, Derek Hale. 

The most reserved, tight lipped motherfucker on the planet has the answers to all of Stiles’ burning questions. Oh, that’s cruel. 

Into Kentucky they go, Missouri gone in the rear view mirror, but everything that was true in Missouri is still true the next state over. At a gas station, Derek gets out and fuels up, sunglasses on, frowning up at the sky in the blinding sunlight. Stiles stays in the car and pouts. 

Derek opens up the driver’s side door and pokes his head in. “You want anything from the convenience store?” 

“No,” he’s being bratty and Derek can tell. He slams the door and goes inside anyway. When he comes back, he’s got a water and Stiles’ favorite soda. Without a single word, he slots the soda into the cup holder on Stiles’ side of the car, starts it up, and drives back onto the highway. 

Derek does things like this. These wordless, silent gestures. Like he’d be embarrassed to be thanked, like he’d rather die than have anyone know he’s actually thoughtful and somewhat in-tune to other people’s feelings or wants. As such, Stiles does not thank him. His thanks is to open the soda up and drink it, so Derek’s time and money does not go to waste. 

They have been in near complete silence for the past five hours, so when Stiles clears his throat and actually starts to talk, Derek seems only mildly surprised. After all, this is Stiles we’re talking about, here. “We’ll have to get some fried chicken while we’re here.” 

Derek’s lips quirk, just the slightest bit, right at the corners.

“It’s a rite of passage.” 

“Sure,” Derek agrees. 

“That makes me crave mashed potatoes, actually,” he scratches at his cheek, and as they’re passing by a Target, Stiles’ eyes linger on it for longer than anyone should have any interest in a Target that looks just like any other in America. He sits up straighter, narrowing his eyes and cocking his head to the side. “There’s something about that place.”

Derek does not need to be asked to stop or pull over – he does so instantly, the car veering off into the turn lane, his blinker coming on. Stiles keeps his eyes on the building, a chill going up his spine. At the same time that it’s like a siren call beckoning him closer, there is a part of him that knows he should not go near it. He’s being told off, told to get away. 

Once they’re parked, Stiles is out of the car and walking. Derek can only trot along behind him, watching his every move like he always is. Against his better judgment, he approaches the side of the building – it’s plain, the Target logo etched some ten feet above his head all red and shiny, but he wants to touch it. The building. He thinks that maybe this will be the one that Laura didn’t quite do right. This will be where she made a mistake in the incantation. She will reveal herself and where she is with her clumsy, novice magic, and this road trip will be over, and Stiles and Derek will be able to walk away, strangers again. 

He tells himself that that is what he really wants, after all. To get away from Derek Hale. Even as he knows, somehow, in the way that he _just knows_ so any other things, that he will never be able to get away from Derek Hale, no matter what he does. 

But all the same, he touches it. Just one hand, pressing against the side of the building like he’s testing the waters. 

Regret is immediate, as is the pain. He doubles over, surprised and shaken, by the force of the attack. It sends him careening back one step, two, three, tripping over his own feet until he’s on the ground in the parking lot. People around him are alarmed, Derek most notably, who is hovering over him with a mask of shock and concern all over his face. 

“Stiles,” he says. He reaches his hands out like he’s going to touch, but then they freeze in midair. “Holy shit, you’re bleeding.” 

From the exact point of pain, Stiles is, indeed, bleeding. Quite a bit. There’s a hole in his shirt and out of it leaks blood, blood, blood, with no sign of the culprit anywhere in sight, and the next thing he knows, he’s coughing and a wad of blood is spit out onto the pavement. 

“Should I call 911?” Derek, idiotically, says this. 

There are other people here, some of them stopping and murmuring to themselves because it seems as though some kid just got stabbed in the parking lot. This is too much of an audience, way too much, and Stiles sucks in a deep breath that hurts, burns, is misery to take, but he fumbles his way up onto his knees. “No, car,” he hisses between grit teeth. He mutters something he only vaguely remembers from an old book, and everyone who had been watching blinks and looks away, confused as to why they were interested in the first place, meandering to their cars or into the store. 

“Stiles, you’re fucking _bleeding_ ,” and there’s that concern again, edging closer to fear, because Derek does not know what this is. He has never seen anything like this before, and as such, he has been rendered useless. 

“I know what to do,” Stiles somehow manages to pull himself onto one leg, then the second, clutching his center where the blood is falling out of him like water from an overturned glass. “Car. Now.” 

Derek doesn’t want to move. He wants Stiles in an ambulance, most likely.

Stiles never ever does this, especially not to people he knows, but he’s desperate and he knows that Derek won’t do what he says otherwise. He uses what little strength that he has to shoot a zing of magic against Derek’s chest – so, almost against his will, Derek reaches out and picks Stiles up. It’s scary how easy it is for Derek to do so, like Stiles weighs as much as a feather, and then they’re moving back to where the car is parked. 

“You hexed me,” Derek accuses, and he’s mad, even as he keeps walking without any of Stiles’ magic to force him to. It’s amazing that someone can be mad and concerned at the same time, but there Derek is, doing it all the same. 

“That’s not what a hex is, but sure,” Stiles coughs again, and more blood goes over the side of Derek’s arm. Derek curses, throws open the passenger side door, and dumps Stiles unceremoniously inside. “Oh, fuck,” Stiles moans, adjusting himself so he’s facing upright. Derek moves around the car and gets to the driver’s side, climbing inside just as Stiles is pulling the zipper of his backpack open with his teeth, his other hand pressed against his open, gaping wound.

“Stiles, what the fuck is –“

“Shut up,” Stiles barks at him, more angry and forceful with him than he’s ever been, but excuse the fuck out of him – he’s bleeding out, currently, no time for pleasantries. He digs around with his free hand, pulling out clothes and tossing them into the backseat haplessly, before he finally gets out a familiar pink crystal. He cradles it in his hands, never so happy to see this stupid rock in all of his life, and presses it against his wound. 

“What is that thing,” Derek demands, and Stiles can feel the pain being leeched out of him slow, steadily slow, enough so that he can breathe, that he can flop back against the seat in relief. 

“It kills off poorly done magic,” he explains, pressing his cheek against the leather of the seat. 

“Poorly done,” Derek repeats, shaking his head incredulously. “It seems to have worked pretty fucking well, to me.”

Stiles shakes his own head right back at him. “It was sloppy, done quickly, and pedestrian.” As he speaks, he pulls the bloody rock away – where there once had been a gaping wound, blood, the whole nine yards, there is only a hole in his shirt and smooth skin. Derek seems mystified, and spooked, and about ready to turn tail and run into the woods. “Let’s see what it is she stabbed me with.” 

“ _Stabbed_?” Derek shouts at the same time that Stiles mutters the curse-revealing spell he had learned from his mother, what seems like a lifetime ago, now. As old and simple as it is, it works. And from where the wound had once been, the shadow of a bloody object pulls itself out from Stiles’ body, like a ghost, an apparition, slowly hovering itself to drift in between Stiles and Derek’s bodies, hanging in mid-air. 

It’s an old, rusty, jagged looking knife. It sort of looks like something that one might see in a museum about the early settlers, or some shit like that – it’s haggard and ancient, and its edges have gone almost completely blunt with age and disuse. 

Stiles just stares at it with a frown, but Derek…seems to know it. The blood drains out of his face and his lips part, like he’s just seen something he never thought he’d see again. Stiles looks between it and Derek again and again, trying to piece together the missing piece of this particular puzzle. “You know what this is,” he assesses, and Derek swallows and seems at a loss for words. 

The knife is corporeal, no longer just the ghost of a thing used in a spell, so Stiles reaches out and grabs it out of the air, holding it in his hands. Though the wound on him is gone, the blade is still covered in blood, because no matter how poorly executed the magic may have been, this thing was, more or less, still actually inside of him at some point. 

Upon closer inspection, the blade has a marking on it, etched into the metal crudely. Stiles would know it anywhere. “This is the Hale crest,” he says, pointing to it, and Derek looks away. 

He looks at the sky, the steering wheel, his lap. Anything but at Stiles and that fucking knife. 

“You know what this is,” Stiles says again, more forcefully. “Derek Hale, what is this fucking thing?” 

“It’s –“ he starts, and then stops. He looks at the knife, again, and he gets this bizarre expression on his face. This sad, forlorn, angry expression that Stiles doesn’t know a word for. “It’s been in my family for…centuries.” 

“Obviously. What does it do, what is its…meaning?” 

“It doesn’t have one.”

“You are the shittiest liar I have ever fucking met,” Stiles hisses, and waves the knifes around in the air a bit. “What does this thing mean?” 

“Christ,” he reaches out and takes the knife away, and he seems mad about it, at first. Then, when it’s in his hands, he almost…cradles it, with a type of reverence reserved for objects of extreme importance and meaning. “…it’s ritualistic, it…it’s old nonsense, is what it is.”

“Hey,” Stiles gestures to himself up and down, his bloody shirt, his woundless chest, “I am made of old ritualistic nonsense. Tell me, I will not laugh.” 

Derek purses his lips and cradles that knife some more. He runs his thumb over the blade, where Stiles’ blood is, and closes his eyes for just a second. When he opens them, he speaks. “It’s from an old ritual. I don’t think it even…people don’t even do it anymore, I don’t think. It’s about…blood bonds, you know?”

Stiles blinks at Derek’s profile. “Uh, no.”

“You slice your hand and someone else slices their hand and you…you know,” he shrugs, still fiddling with the thing in his hands. “It’s a marking thing.” 

To be quite honest, Stiles barely knows what Derek is talking about. While both of them are members of the supernatural class of person, wolves are sort of…primal, in a way that Stiles doesn’t fully understand. Stiles’ magic is ancient and innate within him just like Derek’s wolf is in himself, yes, but they’re completely different lineages and rituals. Derek comes from the forest and animals and weird shit like biting and all that nonsense. Stiles is all earth and sea. They’re different. 

“Why would Laura stab me with an ancient, ritualistic Hale knife?” 

Derek thumbs along the blade some more and frowns at it. There is something there in him that is so deeply fucking sad, Stiles almost has to look away from it, like he shouldn’t be looking at all. It’s an old family heirloom, and Derek’s family went up in smoke, so…Stiles understands that part. But there is something more, another layer to that knife, to Stiles getting it right through the gut, that he isn’t understanding. 

“Likely because it’s what she had on hand,” he shrugs. Then, he runs his fingers through some of Stiles’ still wet blood on the thing, and grimaces. “That fucking bitch.” 

“Whoa,” Stiles snorts. He’s never heard Derek be so derogatory before, but then again, when it comes to siblings, Stiles figures there are simply no rules. “I mean, yeah, sure. She did…fully stab me. Do you have any clue why she would –“

“I don’t know, Stiles,” he cuts him off, and holds the knife out for Stiles to take. It is a lie, Stiles knows that it is, but it is just another one to add to the pile. Stiles takes the stupid thing and wraps one of his t-shirts around it before shoving it deep into his bag, shaking his head in annoyance. “Let’s get going.” 

Stiles has just been stabbed and there’s blood on the seat, but sure, let’s get going. They drive away from the Target and Stiles is exhausted, from using magic and being stabbed and the game of trying to figure out what Derek’s angle with all this is, so he presses his forehead against the glass of his window and closes his eyes, just to rest them. 

Derek is silent on the other side of the car, driving along and maybe thinking about that knife some more. Who had made it. Who told Derek what it means. Where it comes from. If it has powers outside the realm of magic that Stiles will never understand, or if that was all just nonsense that his mother told him when he was a kid. Confirming Stiles’ suspicions, Derek clears his throat, and actually does speak of his own volition for the first time all day long. “It was given to me a long time ago,” he explains, and Stiles cracks one eye open, so Derek knows that he’s listening. “It was…important to me. Now I know it’s just hocus pocus nonsense, but.”

“Hocus pocus, again.”

“I don’t really believe in any of that stuff.”

“Interesting to hear a werewolf say to a witch that he doesn’t believe in _hocus pocus_.”

“You know what I mean,” Derek grouses. The sun is falling behind the horizon, another day is ending, another state, another catastrophe, another nightmare to live through. “Objects are just objects. Sentimental as some may be, they’re never more than just that.”

“I disagree,” he sits up straight, and pulls his trusty deck of playing cards out of his pocket. He holds them out, for Derek to look at them, and Derek actually does. “These are my second limb. If something happened to them, I’d cry and throw a fit.”

“You can just go buy another pack.”

Stiles shakes his head. “Not these. These are mine, they’re special,” he pulls them out of their old, weather worn box that’s barely hanging on by a thread, and fans them out. “My mother gave them to me when I was nine. These are the cards I learned on, and I’ve never gone a day since then without having them in my back pocket.” 

Derek lifts his eyebrow, as though he’s waiting for the point to come. 

“Objects have the power that we give them,” he shrugs, fingering along the edges of them in his hands, remembering what it was like to be a kid, to still have his mother. “That knife maybe is just a knife, but someone in your family lineage eons ago said it was important. And they told someone else, and someone else, down the line, until it was given to you. So, it is. Important.” 

Derek is quiet for a long time. Long after Stiles has put his cards back in his pocket, sat back in his seat, started to close his eyes again, Derek is dead quiet. Then, “you want to do a card trick?”

Stiles perks up immediately, sitting all the way up and smirking, ear to ear. “You mean it?”

Derek already sort of looks like he regrets it, but gestures one hand before laying it back down on the wheel. “Let’s get it over with.”

**

Stiles showers the dried blood off his body the second they get into the hotel room. It goes pink down the drain, swirling around and around, and he watches it in sort of a trance. He scrubs at his skin where the knife went in, and he thinks about what Derek had said about it being…ritualistic.

Wolf rituals are pretty mythic, from what he’s read about them. Pretty horrifying, too. There used to be lots of human sacrifices back in the day, and Stiles wonders if Laura had meant for Stiles to be some sort of blood sacrifice to the wolf gods. The last time Stiles saw her, she was petting a dog at the park and giving Stiles a friendly wave before going on with her usual daily run – somehow, he doubts Laura is set out to cause him serious bodily harm. 

Then, why? To get his attention? To get Derek’s? 

When he gets out, dressed in his pajamas with his hair still damp, Derek has got takeout containers set out on the desk table right next to the television. He gestures for Stiles to help himself, and then secludes himself to his own bed to pick at broccoli beef right out of the box, frowning as he does so. 

Stiles picks up pork fried rice and spring rolls, sitting criss-cross on the bed and flipping on the television. They eat in silence, watching the local news drone on about things that neither of them could possibly care less about. He thinks about how Derek has paid for everything, every single thing on this trip – the hotels, the food, the gas, the sodas, all of it, and has never once asked for Stiles to pitch in. 

Another one of his embarrassed gestures, Stiles is certain. 

They finish eating and Stiles half expects Derek to bridge the gap between their beds and start necking him all over again – or for Derek to say something suggestive, or for him to just strip naked, or any number of vividly absurd things that Stiles can imagine. But nothing like that really happens. 

Derek sleeps in his boxers, so when he strips down it’s more methodical than anything else. He folds his clothes neatly and sets them in his bag. He brushes his teeth, flicks off the light, climbs into his own bed all the way across the room and gets under the covers. 

The television is still on. Stiles says, “want me to shut it off?”

“I could sleep through an earthquake,” and that’s all he says, turning over so his back and the tattoo that matches the carving on the knife that went plunging through Stiles’ stomach are all Stiles can really see of him. 

For all the hell and the stink that Stiles had raised about the two of them going at it earlier in the day, now that Derek clearly has no interest in continuing the pattern, Stiles is…disappointed. He sits there for a while, maybe an hour, until Derek starts snoring, and the final nail is in the coffin. There will be no hurried, insane fucking tonight. Nothing for them to pretend didn’t happen in the harsh light of the morning sun. 

Stiles tucks himself underneath his own covers and falls asleep to the sound of the TV. In seconds, like his subconscious has been lying in wait all day long, he finds himself dropped into the gray-blue ocean, lit up by flames from the surrounding island. In he goes, and he struggles deep, deep, almost touching the bottom. On the sea floor, distorted by the water, he sees the arms of a clock, ticking, ticking, ticking… before he panics, and somehow finds his way back up to the surface. 

The surface is never any better. Up here, he can never swim fast enough, can never get to the shore, can never put out the fire that’s burning all around him, can never get enough air in his lungs, is constantly drowning, is constantly swimming, exhausted, miserable, so bad he wants to scream, and –

“Hey,” Derek shakes him, once, gentle. “It’s me.”

Stiles jerks awake on a huge gasp, as though he really were coming out from the water after nearly drowning, and he’s sweating. He can feel it on his brow, under his arms, all over him, and he’s shaking. Derek has got hands on him, again. This feels like a callback, a direct mirror reflection, of what had happened in that hotel room only days ago – but feels like weeks, months, years, for how much has happened in between then and now. 

“I –“ Stiles starts, his voice hoarse. Had he been screaming again? “I woke you up.” 

“It’s fine,” Derek tells him. Bizarrely, Derek reaches his hand underneath Stiles’ shirt, and he feels along the place where hours earlier, that Hale family knife had lodged itself into his innards. It’s like he’s looking for a scar, or to see if it had really happened, after all. Stiles swallows.

“It was just bad magic,” he assures Derek, shaking his head. “It wasn’t…real.”

Derek’s voice is deep, low, serious, when he says, “your blood is all over it.”

“Well, yeah,” Stiles rubs at his eyes, is too exhausted for this conversation, but is too terrified of the water to go back to sleep. “It’s smoke and mirrors.” 

“But that is your blood, right?”

“Yeah, I mean…” he assesses Derek as much as he can – the television is still on, casting both of them in this sort of eerie, iridescent glow, blue and purple and green. The conversation lit up like that makes it seem like it’s just another dream he’s fallen into. For all he knows, it is. “What is this about?”

“You were having that nightmare again,” he evades the question. He still has his hand on the place where the knife was. 

Stiles has a gamble. He looks Derek up and down, taking in the full picture, and he makes a guess – it could be the clairvoyance, or it could just be his own dumb luck. He has this idea that Derek in the day and Derek at night, when he’s more wolf than man, the moon on his skin, are almost like two different men. Or, two different halves of the same person. The man Derek is all edges and trauma and misery and closed off, a slammed door, a burned husk of a house, nothing more. 

Wolf Derek is more honest, is more instinct, more driven to go after what he wants because it is simply what he wants, nothing more, nothing less. This is a guess. He chances it, and says, “how do you know what my nightmare is of?” 

Derek smiles that same eerie fucking smile, from last night. “Because I have the same ones.” 

“What?” Stiles rears his neck back, frowning. “Why?”

He looks at Stiles. Really looks at him. And Stiles can tell, no matter how much more open Derek is right now, that it does not matter. They are the same person, it’s in the eyes. It’s all in the eyes. “You’re clairvoyant,” Derek reminds him. “Figure it out.”

They’re kissing again, so for the briefest of seconds, Stiles almost lets himself get all caught up in it, like a wave dragging him out to the sea – but this time, after they’ve kissed for maybe only fifteen seconds, Stiles pushes Derek off of him. They stare at one another, Derek’s saliva on his lips, Stiles’ on Derek’s, and Derek frowns. “Stop messing with me.”

“I’m not.” Derek is honest when he says it, but it still sounds like a lie. 

“So you want to fuck, again?” 

“Yes.”

“Then act like it never happened in the morning.” 

“No,” he is angry, which is classic Derek and more proof this isn’t a Jekyll and Hyde type of fairytale nightmare. “I just…”

Stiles raises his eyebrows, an _I’m waiting_ facial expression, because he is tired of always asking and Derek never answering. 

“What do you want me to say?” He demands, holding his hands out around them to the hotel room in the middle of nowhere, the half eaten Chinese food, the television glowing at them, just the two of them. Alone. “I can’t listen to you having that fucking nightmare and not do anything about it.” 

Stiles sits up all the way, so Derek leans away from him with another one of his patented frowns. He looks Derek in the face again, but this time, Derek avoids his eyes. “Why?”

“What do you mean _why_?” He asks it like it’s a fucking stupid question. 

“Why would it matter whether I drown in my dreams or not? To you, of all people.” 

Derek scoffs, and it’s this really indignant thing that spells of annoyance and disbelief. “You have always thought that I must fucking hate you or something.”

“Gee, I wonder where I would get that idea!”

“You don’t know everything, like you think,” he says this with all the accusation in the world. “You don’t know fucking everything. Do you want to do this, or not?”

“ _What_?” Stiles actually puts his hand up against his heart like an affronted maiden from the 1400’s – that’s how shocked he is at this turn in the conversation. Derek is good, like really good, at changing the sails in this back and forth, so one second Stiles is demanding the answer to a question and the next they’re sitting here hemming and hawing over whether or not they’re going to bang it out again. “Are you fucking _wolfed out_?”

Derek points to his face; all human. Stiles guffaws and reaches out, banging his fist against Derek’s scalp a couple of times. “I mean in your _fucking head_. Are you crazy?”

Derek’s bigger, stronger hand comes up and grabs onto Stiles’ wrist, pulling it away from his head, pressing it down into the mattress, so Stiles can’t move it. “You are the single most infuriating person that I have ever fucking met.” 

“Oh, am I? That explains why you want to fuck me so bad, then.”

“It does, actually.” 

“Yikes, no thanks,” Stiles kicks his legs, so his feet push against Derek’s thighs, his shins, trying to push him off his bed. Derek lets go of Stiles’ wrist and glowers, watching as Stiles moves his body away from him, towards the headboard of the bed. “I don’t want to get hate-fucked thank you very much.”

“Is that what you think this is?”

“Ya know? I don’t think this is anything, because I’m done thinking about it altogether,” he pulls his blankets up to his chin, covering his body so Derek will get all lewd thoughts out of his head. “We are not doing this anymore. Case closed.” 

Derek appraises him, the set to Stiles’ jaw, the steely determination in his eyes. He must come to the conclusion that Stiles is bluffing, because instead of getting up and off of Stiles’ bed like any sane human being would do, he reaches his hand out and pulls the covers off of Stiles, revealing his body to the open air. 

Stiles is aghast. “Um!” 

“You have your freaky mind reading bullshit and your fortune telling whatever the hells, but you forget, I have something on you, too,” he climbs on top of Stiles, right on top of him, his hands bracketing Stiles’ head on the pillow so he can’t turn away. Derek puts his face, his fucking mouth, right next to Stiles’ ear, and says, unthinkably, “I can smell that you want me.” 

“Um…” he repeats, and his breath comes out shaky. He feels exposed, like in the Wizard of Oz when the curtain fell back. 

“Tell me you don’t want to,” Derek challenges, pulling away to look Stiles right in the eye. “But not even you are that good at lying.” 

This is not happening again. Stiles will not go down this path, this psycho fucking nonsense, he can’t and he won’t. This isn’t happening. Mind over matter, mind over fucking matter. “I…” he starts, and then he has to clear his throat because he’s all raspy and nervous and Derek is looking, like, right the fuck at him. Close. “…want to. I want you to. The – yeah.” 

“You want to?”

Stiles squirms. All the guys he’s ever fucked, none of them have ever made him squirm like this before. “I want to have sex,” he admits, and Derek takes that as all the consent he needs.

**

The morning is bright. The light casts them as shadows on the pavement, and Derek is doing that thing where he won’t look Stiles in the face. Stiles crosses his free arm over his chest and drinks his coffee and thinks that a cigarette really would do wonders for him right about now, but he doesn’t smoke, so he’ll settle for the caffeine and basking in Derek’s avoidance of the subject.

Stiles is not very coy or shy, so he has no problem bringing it up. “You said you weren’t going to act like it didn’t happen,” he reminds Derek a bit hotly, tossing his empty coffee cup into the trash, squinting up into the sun. Beside him, Derek is still sipping his, sitting on the hood of his car, frowning again. That smile, the weird one from the night time, will not grace his face all day, not until the moon comes out. “You know, I never knew this about you. These two people you are.” 

“Two people,” Derek repeats, like he doesn’t understand it. “It is just me, Stiles.” 

“So then, why don’t you kiss me here?” He gestures to the sun streaming all around them, the couple down the parking lot packing their bags into the own car. “In the day time?” 

Derek drinks his coffee. He drinks and drinks, staring dead ahead out at nothing. 

“Or, we can go back into the room and do it all over again in my bed, if you’d like.” A pause, Stiles looking at him seriously. “But, you won’t. Are you, like, embarrassed of me or something? Because I’m weird? Because I’m a witch? I know wolves and witches don’t typically sleep together, but Christ, it’s not like anyone even knows what either you or I –“

Stiles doesn’t have time to react, before Derek is surging forward and pressing his lips against Stiles’, all violent and harsh. It is quick, like getting struck by lightning, and then Derek is pulling away and looking miraculously grouchy. “There,” he snaps, throwing his own empty cup into the trash. “You want me to lay down the backseat?”

“Um,” Stiles has never said _um_ more in his life than he has this past week and a half with Derek Hale. He blushes, actually blushes, more in surprise than anything else, and shrugs. “No, um. No.” 

“Okay,” Derek is mad. “Then, let’s go.” 

“Okay,” Stiles agrees. He gets into his side of the car and Derek gets into his, starting the engine with a familiar purr. Stiles twiddles his fingers in his lap and bites his lip and thinks maybe he had been wrong, after all – the Derek under the moon is not very much different from the Derek under the sun. They are the same people, after all.

But Derek at night is more…honest about it. Maybe that’s what it is. 

In West Virginia, Stiles wants to listen to Take Me Home, Country Roads so bad he almost hooks up the aux to his phone and plays it. It’s all he can really think about, watching the trees of the woods blow past them. Derek might be thinking about the same thing too, for all that he knows. After all, they share nightmares, who’s to say they don’t share the same songs that get stuck in each other’s heads? 

When dinner time comes, Stiles talks Derek into going out to eat at an actual restaurant, not just some shitty truck stop off the highway, for once. He is grumpy about it, muttering for only the sixteen thousandth time that this is not a vacation, they are not here to have fun or check out cool restaurants or anything of the sort. Yet, when he’s seated in a nice chair and has an actual beer from an actual cold pint glass in his hand, he seems to perk up just the slightest bit. 

Stiles gets a vodka-tonic with a lime and drinks it slowly, looking at how weird Derek looks here among the normal people of planet earth. He wears his leather jacket and his frown, his v-neck black t-shirt, his tattoos, his stubble, the whole package, like any other bad boy from any other town in America. But somehow, it looks different on him. 

The same way that Stiles looks different. The waitress sees how Stiles looks in the light, the pale skin, the eerie eyes, the long fingers with dirt under the nails, and decides she does not like him. She sees how Derek looks just the same, angry and menacing and somewhat mean, and decides she does not like this entire table she’s been forced to wait on. 

Derek orders a steak and Stiles gets pasta, and then they sit there in silence. Derek sips his beer. Stiles sips his vodka. They listen to other people’s conversations. Derek watches a football game on a screen at the fancy bar across the restaurant.

“Do you think Laura really wants to, like, harm me?”

Derek looks at him. “It’s hard to believe.”

“You called her a fucking bitch.”

A sip of beer, a shrug. “She’s my sister,” he supplies, like that’s all the answer in the world. “And she had just stabbed you with a poorly performed spell on a Target in Bumfuck, Kentucky. In that moment, she was a fucking bitch.” 

“But you don’t think, like…” he fiddles with his straw, stabbing it into the ice again and again, “she would have any reason to truly want to harm me?” 

Derek has that look in his eyes. The evasive one. Like he will tell the truth, but only part of it, and Stiles would do well to not ask about the other part if he knows what’s good for him. “No. Absolutely not. The knife was a message for me more than for you.”

This is new information. Stiles’ antenna goes up, and he is careful to watch every tic in Derek’s facial movements, digging for information. “Oh?”

But he will not elaborate any further. He sips his drink and sits there like a black cloud, and Stiles takes in a deep breath and rests his chin in his palm; if he wanted to, he could force Derek to tell him the truth, that’s the thing of it. It is a simple spell, one he mastered by performing it on Scott again and again, figuring it would come in handy one day. Scott was an easy target because he is guileless to begin with, but it was still somewhat of a torment to be forced to speak when he didn’t want to, to have no control over his bodily functions, to speak only what Stiles wanted to know. It’s not exactly a fun spell. 

Stiles does not do those types of things lightly, and Derek knows that. He does not use controlling spells for fun. He does not overuse magic. What he had done to Derek in the parking lot earlier was a matter of life and death, so Derek hadn’t been that angry about it and Stiles hadn’t let himself feel guilty. But using a truth spell on Derek without his consent would make any information he got out of him tainted.

And, plus, Derek would be angry with him. Hurt, maybe. 

“You have my fire and drowning nightmare as well,” Stiles prods, and Derek just nods his head once, miserable to have to be having this conversation at all. “How do you like it? Personally, I think it’s a little repetitive.” 

“Stiles,” Derek starts, leaning forward a bit, so Stiles leans forward too. “I don’t want to talk about that.” 

“Oh,” Stiles leans back. For every one step forward that he takes with Derek, he finds himself taking fifteen backwards as well. They had kissed only once this morning, and then Derek hadn’t mentioned it again or done anything of the sort later on. Now, they’re here having dinner together like two people on a date might, but Derek doesn’t want to talk to him. Stiles is an open book, so he says, “that hurts my fucking feelings.”

“Christ,” Derek mutters, like other people having feelings is a huge burden to him. “Stiles, come on.” 

“It does,” he insists, jabbing at his ice some more with the straw. “You want to fuck me and touch me and whatever, but then you don’t even want to fucking talk to me.” 

“Fine,” he is mad again, but he keeps going. “I hate that fucking nightmare. I knew it was about you the first time I ever had it.”

“About me?” Stiles had thought that they were just, coincidentally or by some twist of fate, simply having the same dream. He had never stopped to think that Derek’s identical nightmare was in some way shape or form… _about_ him. Or, anything. 

Derek is done with his beer. He sets the pint glass down on the edge of the table for the waitress to collect, and meets Stiles ‘eyes over the table. “Fire and water.” 

He says this like it is obvious. Stiles blinks at him. 

“Fire,” he points a single index finger at himself, then to Stiles, “water.” 

Stiles churns that information around in his brain, examining it from every angle. Of the two of them, Derek is definitely fire, if one of them must be. Not to mention, he’s also been marked by fire in his life, and that kind of mark lasts forever, eternity, and so of course his symbolism in a dream would be a raging fire – a forest fire, nonetheless. 

Water for himself, though…Stiles hadn’t ever likened himself to an element before. He’s just himself. “What makes you think that?”

“Aren’t you the analytical one?”

“Most times,” he says, slurping to the bottom of his drink. “This has been a particular mystery I have not been able to parse. The nightmare, the trip, your sister, the curses, the sex.” 

“You want another one?” Derek gestures to Stiles’ empty glass, already giving a two fingered gesture to their waitress. She sees and hurries over, looking between the two of them like everyone they have encountered on their trip has looked at them – who are these people? Who are they to each other? Where are they from? 

“I will have another, yeah,” he points to his empty glass and smiles at her. She warms up to that, but Derek just pushes his empty glass closer to her and says not a word. “That’s asshole for _I’ll have another one, too_.”

She smiles back at him, like they’re in on the joke together, and vanishes to collect their drinks. 

They come, and they’re drinking again, staring at one another. Stiles squeezes his lime into his drink and Derek watches the movement, his fingers, the juice dripping over them. “Have you ever wondered why, even though we couldn’t be more different, couldn’t have less in common, we wind up in each other’s trajectories almost all the time?”

Stiles dunks what’s left of his lime into his drink and shrugs. “You need my help sometimes, I need yours sometimes, it’s not that strange.” 

Derek growls under his breath, lifting his eyes to the ceiling and seeming so fucking annoyed it is almost unbelievable. “…you are _clairvoyant_ ,” he hisses, shaking his head. 

“You think the dream has been foreshadowing you and I going on this trip?”

“Not the trip,” he mutters, and then closes his mouth, shrugging, like gee, maybe, could be, looking away. Stiles doesn’t have the energy to try figuring that one out, so he just sighs and longs for his pasta to come. 

“It would explain a lot,” he admits. “Maybe the time card means this is the time we needed to, uh, get to know each other? Maybe we’re meant to be in each other’s lives to help each other out? It would explain why if we don’t sleep together, the dream comes, but if we do, it doesn’t.” 

Derek is tight lipped, silent. He is done with this conversation, he has done his fair share of speaking to appease Stiles’ insatiable appetite for attention, and now he wants to drink his beer and eat his steak. As if on cue, the food arrives, and Derek looks relieved not just to have a hunk of meat to rip into, but also an excuse to not fucking talk about this anymore. 

When they pull into what feels like their sixtieth hotel parking lot of the trip, Stiles clears his throat before Derek gets out to book them a room. He dares himself to, and then says it. “Maybe just one bed this time?” 

Derek doesn’t say anything. He closes the door behind him and goes to the lobby. But when they get to the room, there’s only one king sized bed. And when bed time comes, they have sex and it has the same frantic, desperate edge to it that it always has – when Derek lies down next to Stiles afterward, he puts his hand on Stiles’ belly.

Where the knife had gone in.


	3. Burned at the Stake

For the first time since their trip began, Stiles is awake before Derek in the morning. It’s almost jarring, to see bright, mid morning sunshine streaming in through the blinds in their hotel room, instead of the peaks of gray he usually gets when Derek wakes him up before dawn. He’s confused, sitting up and looking over his shoulder to find Derek still snoring, completely passed out, drooling on his pillow. 

Stiles figures that just like he hasn’t gotten very much sleep lately, that Derek hasn’t either, and leaves him be for the moment. He collects his shower caddy from his bag and closes the bathroom door quietly behind him, flicking on the light and meeting his own eyes in the mirror. 

He is surprised by what he sees, when he really shouldn’t be. He looks well rested for a change, his hair mussed from sleep and sex, and he’s got…hickeys on his neck. Stiles remembers getting them, it would be pretty hard to forget, but seeing them in the harsh lighting, all purple and red, he’s embarrassed and has to look away. 

Derek is kind of a brute in bed. That’s the only word that Stiles can think to describe it. And it is bonkers, totally bananas, that he knows that, now. Boy, if Scott found out…

Stiles starts brushing his teeth, more mechanical than anything else. Before he even spits for the first time, Derek is bursting into the bathroom like a bat out of hall, startling Stiles into dropping his toothbrush into the sink with a _plop_. 

“Jesus fucking Christ!” 

“You let me sleep too late,” he is accusatory, and he looks…sleepy, still. He’s got bed head. Stiles has never actually gotten to see Derek with bed head, because by the time Stiles is usually being awoken, Derek is already showered and dressed for the day. 

“What if I had been in here shitting? Ever heard of knocking?” He picks his toothbrush back up and starts viciously brushing again, rolling his eyes. 

“I can hear what you’re doing through the walls.” 

“Thanks for reminding me.” 

Derek disappears from the doorway, likely to go be mad in the next room. He brushes and brushes, spits, finishes, and rinses his mouth out. When he looks back, Derek is there again, hovering with his own shower materials tucked under his arm. He says, “we should shower together, to make up for the lost time.” 

Stiles wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and blinks. To be totally honest, he is awaiting a punch line, because Derek cannot be serious. But he is. Derek puts his shampoo in the shower right next to where Stiles set his up to use when the time came, and starts the water, even though Stiles has not agreed to this. 

Well, let’s not put up pretenses anymore. Stiles probably would have agreed even if Derek had asked instead of commanded. This is sort of how they operate, now. 

Derek pulls his boxers off and steps in, leaving Stiles standing there blinking at his bare back before the curtain crinkles as he pulls it back. Stiles quickly undresses, piling his dirty clothes up on top of Derek’s, and tries not to feel weird about it when he climbs into the tight space right behind Derek, who is already lathering up his hair and going to town getting clean. 

Stiles stands in what little of the spray he can get back here, shivering with his arms crossed over his chest. Truth be told, though he is sort of a low grade Casanova and has slept with more guys than he can count on both hands, he has never in his life showered with another person. Not clinically, not sexually, nothing. He has only ever been by himself in this particular situation, and so now that he’s standing here with another person, he feels unsure of what he’s supposed to be doing. Offering to wash Derek’s hair for him? Christ, Stiles has no idea. 

Derek turns after rinsing the soap out of his hair and he says, “you’re cold.” 

“Not a lot of water distribution,” Stiles jokes, because duh, and sort of expects Derek to get out of the way and offer Stiles his turn under the spray. Instead, Derek grabs him by his hips and pulls him flush against his own body – and he is warm. Like, really warm. Stiles has known that Derek runs hotter than the average person because it’s kind of the werewolf way; but his natural body heat, coupled with the heat on his skin from the water and the steam all around them…he is big time warm. Curl up by the fire and read type of warm. 

So, this _is_ going to be a sexy shower after all, in spite of Derek pretending to care about “lost time.” In testament to this, Derek leans down and kisses Stiles on the neck, right on one of the spots he had sucked a mark into last night. 

It hurts, when Derek pulls on it again, so he grips onto Derek’s wet arm and winces.

“Sorry,” Derek says, and starts to move away. 

“No, it’s okay, it –“ he swallows. Derek is looking at him right in the eyes, and Stiles does not typically back down from eye contact, not even with Derek – but when they’re like this, _together_ together, he feels exposed and like Derek knows too much, so he gets nervous. “…it feels good.”

Derek raises one eyebrow, then leans down and sucks at another leftover bruise. Stiles tightens his hold on Derek, tilting his head back so he has more room to work. It goes on like that for a minute or two, Derek sucking and biting at marks he’s already made and then laving his tongue over them to soothe the ache. Stiles gets hard embarrassingly fast, rock hard at that, his cock twitching against Derek’s thigh, and he lets loose this embarrassing sound that’s echoes oddly in their tight space. 

Something about that sound really gets to Derek, Stiles has noticed the few times they’ve fooled around. It’s only seconds after it spills out of Stiles’ mouth that Derek is taking him by his hips again, spinning him around and bending him over just enough that he can paw around Stiles’ ass. He pokes a finger, just one, and Stiles’ breath hitches. It’s tender. “Careful,” he says, after clearing his throat. “I’ve been getting railed by a werewolf lately, so it’s a little sensitive.”

Derek actually laughs. It’s short and clipped, but it is a genuine and true laugh. 

He slides his finger in and works it in and out, so Stiles spreads his legs a little bit to give Derek better access. It’s hard to do, because what the movies don’t tell you about fucking in La Quinta Inn showers is that there is absolutely no room to really fuck at all. It’s a wonder either of them can even move in here, let alone do anything dirty. 

A second finger pokes its way in. Stiles presses his hand against the wall, bending over more. His forehead is almost pressed against the back wall, the water pounding his bare back. Then, a third. Stiles hiccups small sounds from the back of his throat, because it’s a lot and he really is sensitive, but it feels like a good-hurt, just enough that he doesn’t want it to stop anytime soon. 

Derek reaches his free hand around and strokes Stiles in tandem with the fingering, quick and hard, and Stiles really does press his face against the wall, his entire body shaking from the intensity of the pleasure. These desperate, sobbing type of sounds claw their way out of his throat and Derek likes that, Stiles knows that he does. He strokes harder, his fingers go erratic, and it’s seconds that Stiles is striping his come across the shower wall and into the tub, swirling down the drain with the water. “Fuck,” he breathes out when it’s done, as Derek pulls his fingers out and cups Stiles’ ass cheeks with both hands. “No one’s ever done that to me before, holy shit.”

“Good,” Derek, bizarrely, says this, and Stiles does not have the time to ponder what he even means by it – because he’s being straightened up, pushed against the wall, picked up with hands underneath his legs.

Derek presses him against the wet wall and kisses him, his arms holding Stiles up until he guides those legs to wrap around his middle. Stiles crosses his ankles behind Derek’s back and kisses him just the same. He has never, not in all his life, been kissed the way Derek is kissing him now. 

It is frantic. Desperate. Like there is no amount of kissing that would ever be enough. Like if he could, he’d shove his tongue all the way down Stiles’ throat and keep it there, to be inside of him in more than one way, in every way he could possibly be. 

The head of his cock starts inching its way toward Stiles’ entrance and…he can’t. He just can’t do it again. Last night, Derek had practically broken the bed it had been so fucking rough, and he just got sent into outer space with the fingering of the century so he…can’t. He pulls away from the kiss and says, “it’s too sore, I can’t. I’m sorry, it’s just…”

Derek looks him in his face, and his brow furrows. “Don’t be sorry,” he shakes his head, confused at Stiles’ reluctance to say this at all. Stiles has told guys that he didn’t wanna do penetration before for a myriad of legitimate reasons, and honestly, some of them have been real class A dickbags about it – but Derek just sets Stiles down on his feet and kisses him some more, like it’s not even a problem. 

They kiss for a while. Stiles is amazed they haven’t run out of hot water, yet. 

Derek licks Stiles’ wet cheek, and it’s gross and weird so Stiles laughs in spite of himself and pushes Derek away playfully. Instead of going anywhere, Derek presses his lips to Stiles’ ear and asks, “can I jerk off on you?”

Stiles is alarmed. He laughs again, surprised, and then Derek pulls away to look him in the face. He is stone cold serious, so Stiles sobers up and tries to take him seriously. “Uh – you mean… _on_ me?”

“Yes.”

“Uh…” it’s not the weirdest request he’s ever gotten, but it is up there. “…okay, sure.” 

Immediately, Derek kisses him again, almost as though it’s in thanks for letting Derek do his weird kinky bullshit. Stiles is not proud of the things he’s let men do to him in the past, so he’s beyond okay with Derek believing this is the most fucked up thing any guy has ever asked him to do. “Will you get on your knees?” At Stiles’ brief hesitance, which is more surprise than it is anything else, Derek tacks on, “if you want.” 

Without commentary, Stiles lowers himself down. The porcelain is uncomfortable on his bony knees, but it’s tolerable, so he rests his hands on his thighs and watches Derek grip onto his own length with one hand. The other comes up to cup Stiles on the cheek. It is the most intimate, gentle thing that Derek has ever done to him, this sensitive little touch to his face - one of his fingers caresses Stiles on the lips, almost reverent. When he starts stroking, it occurs to Stiles that this might just be in the running for the top five hottest things he’s ever seen in his entire fucking life.

Derek, who has always been a walking ad for sex let’s be honest, soaking wet, steamy, jerking himself off inches away from Stiles’ own face. This is, like, pornographic. All things where Derek concerned are starting to feel that way. 

At the moment that Derek fists his hand into Stiles’ hair to pull his neck back, exposed and open, angling his cock right at him and grunting, it becomes very clear that this is not just some oddly specific fetish that Derek has. This is werewolf stuff, plain and simple; when Derek spills on Stiles’ skin, down his neck and a bit onto his chest, Stiles gets that it’s more than just sex, to him. 

It’s ritualistic. That word that Derek had used to describe the knife. An old, old werewolf practice of marking something. Unfortunately, Stiles can only think to liken it to a dog pissing on a tree. It’s territorial and possessive, and unbidden the thought comes to Stiles that if Scott ever fucking got word of this, he would shoot Derek in the head without any regrets. 

It gets worse when Derek doesn’t even let the water rinse the jizz away. He honest to god rubs it into Stiles’ skin, pressing his palm into it so the scent will stick around long after this shower is over and done with. Stiles just sits there and lets it happen, silent and unsure if he should say anything at all.

They’ve fucked a bunch of times, now. They’ve messed around. They’ve kissed. All of that. None of it comes close to this moment – because this is the moment that it is obvious that it is not just fucking. 

This is something else. It means something else. 

In the car, Stiles cannot think of a single fucking thing to say. West Virginia is beautiful, so he tasks himself with staring out the window, incessantly jiggling his leg and keeping his sunglasses plastered on so Derek won’t look in his eyes and know that Stiles is thinking too much for his own good. Nervously, he pulls out his cards and dicks around with them in his hand. He shuffles them, caresses the corners, wonders what his mother would say about all this. 

Historically, as Stiles has said before, witches and wolves do not have sex with each other. Stiles would not go so far as to say the two species hate each other, but he would go so far as to say there is bad blood between the groups. Wolves are rude, territorial, primal, vicious. In the books that have been passed down his mother’s side of the family for generations, they are not written of very kindly. The drawings of them depict them as monsters, with long teeth biting into human necks and pillaging villages, and all manner of hellish imagery. Stiles grew up with the notion that they are like dogs, untrained animals, essentially. 

Of course, when Scott turned out to be one, Stiles’ prejudices flew out the window, but the bad blood in his veins is still there, whether he wants it to be or not. 

His mother is probably turning around in her grave, knowing that Stiles let a werewolf do that to him. 

Neither of them have spoken a word in hours, and Derek notices. He clears his throat suddenly and says, “you seem to be thinking a lot.” 

“I am always thinking a lot, you know that.”

“Typically you speak some of those thoughts out loud.”

Stiles turns a card over and glares at it. The king of hearts, because of course it is. “Did your family hate witches?” 

This surprises Derek. Who knows what he was imagining that Stiles was daydreaming about, but either way, the question takes him off guard. It takes him a second to formulate an appropriate response. “Well,” he starts, and Stiles already half knows the answer, just from his hesitant tone alone. “My family is very, very old.” 

“I know that.”

“Even things that my mother believed were somewhat…” he is picking his words very carefully. “…antiquated.”

“So, what you’re saying is, the Hales have a very long history of burning witches at the stake.” 

Derek is a shit liar and he knows that Stiles knows he is, and aside, he doesn’t typically lie just to spare someone’s feelings. He is blunt when he says, “there have only been one or two burnings at the stake that I know of. Centuries ago.”

Things like that linger in a lineage. Tons of people walking around out there have some ties to witch hunting in their blood, even humans, so Stiles is used to it. Still, hearing Derek say it aloud, it makes him wonder. 

“Why are you thinking about that?”

Stiles flips another card. The king of hearts, mocking him. “It is just very strange the way that things play out, don’t you think?” 

Derek doesn’t look directly at him – just keeps his eyes on the road as he passes a huge semi. It bumbles along and the engine roars right next to Stiles’ window. “Just so you know, I might not really like the hocus pocus bullshit, but I do not believe in…all that.” 

In spite of himself, Stiles smiles. “So I won’t wake up tied to a cross with you lighting kindling at my feet.” 

“No,” he smirks. “I will not burn you at the stake, Stiles.”

They go quiet for another long while. The welcome sign for Pennsylvania passes them by after Stiles gets a weird feeling about a diner on the side of the road that takes them up North instead of further East into Virginia. They don’t get out and fiddle with Laura’s poorly done spells, not anymore, since the stabbing. Stiles prefers to not be put under extreme duress, thank you very much. 

It’s when Derek stops for gas and then slides back into his seat that Stiles finally plucks up the courage to speak about what had happened earlier, staring down at his hands as he does. “I know what you did, by the way,” he says, and Derek pauses before starting the engine again. “What you did in the shower, I know what that means.” 

Derek grips the steering wheel. “You could not possibly imagine what that means, Stiles.”

“Try me,” he turns in his seat, while in front of them, a bored teenager is fueling up and clicking around on her phone. “I’ve read a lot about wolves, and I know what you were doing.” 

“So, what was I doing?”

“You were putting –“ he gestures, vaguely, his hand flailing around in the air as Derek tracks it with his eyes, “…your scent onto me. You know, if Scott knew –“

“Scott,” Derek snorts, rolling his eyes to the ceiling like even the name itself is a waste of his time. “That kid is a fucking idiot.”

“Be that as it may,” Stiles waves that away like it does not matter, because it doesn’t, “if he knew you were going around marking his best friend with your weird werewolf juices, he would –“

“What would he do?” Derek demands, and he’s yelling, all of the sudden. Derek does not typically yell, not like this, so Stiles is stunned into silence. “I could fucking rip that kid limb from limb, you and I both know that!”

“Whoa,” Stiles says, putting his hands up almost in surrender. “I wasn’t trying to-“

“You don’t _belong_ to Scott just because he’s your little werewolf buddy, you know that, right?” 

“Oh, so I guess you figure I belong to _you_ , then?”

Derek starts the car and revs the engine, abrupt enough that the kid in front of them fumbles her phone into a puddle and screams. He drives too quickly out of the parking lot, slamming to a stop at the intersection, so hard Stiles jerks against his seatbelt. “Derek, you need to calm down.”

“I’m fine,” he barks, which is all the indication that Stiles needs to know he isn’t, really. 

Stiles sits back in his seat, and he blinks, and feels whiplashed. All he had said was that Scott would be pretty fucking mad about this, whether he would be right to be mad or not – it is just the truth. He hadn’t realized he was, like, throwing some gauntlet between the two of them, over which one of them gets to mark Stiles as anything. Derek is beyond mad about this, because wolves are crazy and apparently, Derek has started to think of Stiles as his bone to chew on, or something. 

Stiles figures his best course of action in calming Derek down is to go quiet. He sits and lets Derek stew and grind his teeth for a half hour or so, while Stiles bites his nails and tries to move as little as possible. 

When Derek does finally speak again, he is a lot more calm. He’s not yelling, at least. “That is just how it is with me, all right?” He shakes his head, like he’s mad at himself more than anyone else, and Stiles stays quiet. “I can’t just…sleep with you. It’s not that simple.”

Stiles knows what he means. That he can’t just have a casual fling with Stiles, can’t let Stiles be out in the world walking around without letting other wolves know that they’re fucking and to not come near him or else, can’t just kiss and forget about it. 

What Stiles doesn’t know is whether Derek means anyone, or if he just means Stiles. If it’s just Stiles.

**

In the middle of the night, in the Holiday Inn room 113, Stiles wakes up. He has not had the nightmare that he and Derek share in days, since he started sleeping in the same bed as the wolf, and for that he is grateful – so when he blinks awake and sees the clock reading 3:13 in the morning, he knows someone is trying to talk to him. 

He sits up. Derek is snoring, dead to the world, and doesn’t notice it when Stiles pulls the covers off of himself and gets out of bed. The bathroom light is on, the door cracked open, when Stiles knows that when they had fallen asleep the door was shut, the light off, and he sighs. 

When the pushes open the door all the way, he finds everything in its place, except for a single tarot card sitting on the counter next to the sink, deliberately placed. Time. Above his head, a clock ticks, and Stiles reaches out to take the card into his hands, curling his fingers around it. He would rip this one up again, but he knows it would just be back, the clock would keep ticking. 

He closes his eyes and wonders aloud, “what am I missing?” 

Derek hears everything, so it not a terrible shock when he materializes half asleep in the doorway, rubbing at his eyes and frowning. “What the hell are you doing?” He asks, and then gestures with his head back towards the empty bed going cold. “Come back to bed.” 

Stiles sighs and shows him the tarot card. Derek looks at it, frowns, then looks back to Stiles’ face. “So?”

“You know, Derek, I know there is something you’re not telling me, and somehow I think it is related to this card.” 

Derek shakes his head. “I don’t know anything about that nonsense.” 

Intuitively, Stiles knows that he does. He just fucking knows, and he grits his teeth and shakes his head right back at Derek, angry. 

“Stiles, come on,” he gestures again, to the pillows and the blankets awaiting them. “It’s just a stupid card.” 

It isn’t. Stiles is still in the hour glass, and the sand is almost out, and Derek is lying to him. It was one thing to lie to Stiles when they hated one another, but now that Derek thinks they can sleep with one another and kiss and all that, Stiles is being pushed to his limit. The truth has a way of finding its way to the surface, after all.

**

When they cross the state line into New York, Stiles knows without a doubt that Laura is close. As soon as the Welcome sign is behind them, he sits up straighter in his seat and says, “she’s here,” absolutely sure of himself. Derek, for his part, looks…shocked. Not just surprised, or happy, or any of the above. Just…absolutely shocked. He might have been starting to think that they would be on this road trip forever, or at least until they got to Canada and had to go back because neither of them have a passport. 

Laura was starting to seem more and more like a ghost, disappearing into nothing. Derek is used to having people disappear on him, so the idea that someone may actually come back is baffling to him. Stiles just sits back and wonders if this is what the time card has been referring to all the while; if he’s just now finally catching up. If the nightmares are over and done with, now. 

Derek drums his hands on his knee. It is a very strange nervous tic that Stiles can honestly say he has never seen Derek perform before. Come to think of it, he doesn’t think he’s ever actually seen Derek nervous, let alone allowing it to be so obvious. 

Stiles comments on it. “You seem tense.”

He shifts in his seat and looks at Stiles for only a second, before flicking his eyes away to face forward again. “I am not looking forward to seeing her.”

This, Stiles cannot believe. He throws his hands in the air. “Uh, if you hate her so much, why did we even go on this god forsaken trip?”

“It’s not that I hate her. It’s that she clearly had a point in doing it, and I do not feel like getting into the argument.” 

Stiles crosses his arms over his chest and is annoyed, mutters something about _should’ve stayed home_ under his breath. 

Derek hears it the same as he would’ve heard it if Stiles had shouted it at him. “You’ve been pissy at me ever since last night,” he points out, and Stiles pouts some more and stares out his window. “You really think that stupid tarot card incriminates me as a liar.” 

“I don’t think anything, Derek Hale. I _know_.”

“You can be mad at me all you want,” he waves his hand like it all doesn’t matter, is semantics anyway. “This trip is almost over.”

And what does that mean, Stiles wonders? Does that mean that Derek and Stiles will just go right back to hating one another and only speaking when they absolutely must? This whole trip a fever dream, the sex a side effect of their shared space and nothing more?

It is all irrelevant, either way. Less than twenty minutes in the state of New York, and Stiles finds the hotel she’s staying in, right there off the highway, like she was barely trying to hide at all. It a Holiday Inn for Christ’s sake, with a pool and kids splashing around in it as Derek and Stiles walk past. They don’t need to go to the lobby to talk to the girl at the desk, because Stiles has it on a very good assumption that Laura’s room number is 213. 

It’s a lucky guess. 

Derek knocks three times on the door, hard, and then steps back and seems nervous again. He looks both ways down the hall as though he’s mapping out escape strategies, the best window to leap out of if things go South, what he would do with Stiles if a fight were to break out. 

Stiles had expected that maybe Laura would try to make a break for it, or something. After all, she did very much go running and did her level best to cover up her tracks, and she knows god damn well who is standing on the other side of this door. 

But she unlocks the door and opens it. She’s standing there in leggings and a t-shirt, her hair piled up into a messy bun on top of her head, the familiar necklace with the Hale crest hanging from her neck as she crosses her arms and looks at the two boys with a twist to her mouth, like she finds them unimpressive. “Took you long enough,” she snarks, and then holds the door open wider for them to come inside. 

Without another word, she turns on her heel and goes back into the bowels of her hotel room, leaving Derek and Stiles standing there. The invitation to follow her inside is obvious, so they share a glance and move at the same time. 

The door isn’t wide enough for their shared shoulder width, so they wind up bumping into the door jamb on either side with a crash, Derek swearing under his breath and Stiles grunting. “You first,” Derek suggests, taking Stiles gingerly by the shoulders and moving him into the room. 

Inside, there’s not much to see. No evidence of a woman on the run. Just a duffel bag with her clothes and some Knick knacks. A magic book from the store Stiles frequents. Some charms and a candle. Stiles points at them as Derek sidles up beside him, his eyes narrowing. “That’s the book you’ve been using to try and kill me?”

“Kill you?” She repeats, sitting down on the bed criss-cross, casual as all get out. “I was not trying to kill you, Stiles. I was trying to –“

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me with this horseshit,” Derek starts up, and he’s mad, big mad, super mad – he’s all drawn up tight like any moment he’s going to shift into a full blown dog and start chewing up the bed sheets. “You fucking dragged us all the way across the country for no god damn reason!” 

“No reason?” Now _she_ is mad, and Stiles is deeply uncomfortable being in between two very angry werewolves – siblings, at that. He takes a single step back and thinks about hiding in the bathroom. “If I didn’t do this, you never would’ve –“

“Be quiet,” he commands, and Laura stands up from the bed. This is the moment Stiles wonders if he’s going to have to break up a physical fight, because they’re both so tense, angry. But no punches are thrown; just Laura looking him right in the face, Derek looking right back. “You don’t know what you’re fucking talking about.”

“You did fully try to kill me, also,” Stiles points out, maybe just to get the attention onto him for a moment so no one comes to blows. They both turn to look at him. “You fully put a knife in me. I mean, it was not very well done, but…the knife went in.”

“It did,” she agrees, “you’re fine.”

“Well, I mean, physically, but the trauma of –“

“It wasn’t just any old knife, was it?” At this, she looks right at Derek. She has this all-knowing smile on her face, like she’s won, or something, but Derek does not look very amused. “You remember it, don’t you?”

Derek’s jaw is clamped shut. They are in a staring match. “I should’ve known this is what all this was about,” he growls, and Laura smiles, like she is still winning. 

“What is it?” Stiles asks, and Derek does not look at him – but Laura does. 

She says, “that knife is ceremonial. To put your blood on it was to –“

“Laura,” Derek growls, threatening, and he’s serious. This is not an idle threat. But all the same, Laura just raises her eyebrows at him, like she’s surprised by him.

“You still haven’t told him?” She asks, shaking her head as though she cannot believe it. “All this time you’ve been with him, and I can _smell you_ all over him, and you haven’t told him?”

“Told me what?”

Derek is rigidly still. Stiles is certain that any second, he will become that scary black wolf with the blue eyes, and chew her up like a dog toy. 

“You’ve been with him, and you’ve marked him, and he’s got his blood on the knife, but you still won’t tell him?” 

“Tell me what?” He demands, this time more forcefully – still, the siblings just stare at one another. It is not very often that Stiles feels like everyone knows something that he doesn’t, but this is just such an occasion, and it infuriates him. “Derek?”

Derek is angry. His shoulders are a tight, tense line that’s about to snap, and he refuses to look in Stiles’ direction. Either because he is just that angry, or because he is too ashamed to do so. 

Laura, apparently, is the honest one in the Hale family, or what’s left of it anyway. She looks right at Stiles and says, “I wasn’t trying to kill you, or even really harm you,” she says, and Derek walks away. He goes to the window and rubs at his forehead, looking out the window at Albany, and he doesn’t say a fucking word. “I wanted this to happen, and I knew if I disappeared Derek would ask you for help, and I knew I needed to buy you two time and I thought he would…but of course I’m the idiot, thinking my brother could have a healthy emotional conversation with someone, least of all you.” 

“Least of all me,” Stiles repeats, dumbfounded.

“That knife that I cut you with,” she points to his belly, somehow knowing that’s right where he got it, “is not just any knife. When you put the blood of another on it, it links that person to the Hales.”

“Oh,” Stiles blinks. He still doesn’t get what all this is supposed to mean. 

“Derek has always been too chicken shit to ever do anything about it, but we’ve always known,” she crosses her arms again, shrugging like this is all just another day for her. “He’s your familiar.”

“I don’t have a familiar,” he says, automatic. 

“Uh, yeah, you do,” she gestures with her head to Derek, still standing at the window looking miserable, terrible, like a fucking ghoul over there too fucking ashamed to even move. “I’m sorry that I never told you before, but he insisted that I never tell anyone, even when –“

“How do you know this?” He asks, cutting her off abruptly. “Familiars are – I don’t think you understand what that even means.” In movies and shows, familiars are a lot of different things; but Stiles grew up knowing that a familiar was like another piece of him. Some part of his soul put into another living creature, kind of like one of Stiles’ nine lives. But more than that. It’s complicated, hard to explain, even harder to believe that these two idiots could understand anything about it. It’s sacred, deeply fucking sacred witch lore, dating back as far as Moses. 

They don’t go around just telling anyone about it. 

“Why do you think you and Derek wind up around each other all the time, despite Derek’s best efforts to avoid you?” 

Stiles doesn’t know. 

“Why do you think you’ve been having the same nightmare as him for years on end? Or that you even agreed to go on this trip with him in the first place in spite of how much of an asshole he is to you? It’s because you’re linked,” she crosses her index finger and middle finger together in the air, “and he’s in love with you but he’s a fucking idiot and –“

“Don’t you think you’ve said enough?” Derek finally turns, and he just seems…different, somehow. Still angry, but almost smaller. Like the information being out there in the open has shrunk him down, made him _less_ , somehow. 

Stiles looks between the two of them and he frowns. “Is this true?” He asks Derek, and Derek won’t meet his eyes. He looks right at his feet, right down at the ground, like he’s fascinated by it. “Derek, is it true?”

He takes a step forward, and Laura moves out of his way, like _sure, go ahead, finally_. So he takes several more steps, quick and angry, and he brings both of his hands up to shove Derek in the chest as hard as he can. It barely moves the other man, but it is satisfying to do it all the same. “Look me in the eyes,” he commands, and Derek does. “You knew this? You’ve known this? This is true?”

“I –“

Before he even has a chance to lie, Stiles smacks him in the chest again and snarls, “ _tell me the truth_.”

A purple twinkle of magic in Derek’s eyes, and then he straightens up before he can help it, and like he’s vomiting it out, he says, “I’ve known since you were sixteen,” then deflates, breathless, like he cannot believe he just said that. Stiles had forced him to. Of course since Stiles was sixteen, of course – and this is he detail that sells it. Stiles remembers his sixteenth birthday, too, waiting for his familiar to come. Waiting. Waiting. 

It doesn’t matter. Stiles’ chin wobbles and he’s humiliated, for some reason, he feels like a fucking idiot. This whole thing, this whole time, his whole life…all of it. He can’t even wrap his brain around it. He’s going to cry, and the last thing he wants is to cry, because it would just be the cherry on top of this fucking humiliation. Stiles does the only thing he can rationally think to do, which is to turn tail and run away. 

He goes out the door, ignores Laura’s call of “Stiles, wait!”, ignores her turning around to yell at Derek, ignores all of it. He goes down the hallway, down the stairs, into the lobby where there are other people who see him and they see that he’s upset and make room for him. By now, he’s already crying, wiping at traitor tears as they stream down his face. 

He makes it outside into the balmy afternoon, humid and miserable, and just keeps walking. Really, he has nowhere to go. He’s never been to Albany before, and all the faces he sees are strangers and all the signs he sees don’t make sense to him, but he keeps walking. 

Heavy foot falls are running behind him, coming up fast, and it’s Derek’s voice that calls after him. “Stiles,” he says, and Stiles barely even turns around. 

“I’m storming off,” he snarls, “that usually means I don’t want to be followed.”

But Derek’s footsteps keep coming, and he’s fast, of course he’s fast, so Stiles throws up a wall. It’s invisible, but Derek slams against it all the same, hard. He bangs his fist on it, so strong the thing nearly cracks, but instead just vibrates and rattles against the force of it. “God dammit, Stiles!” He yells, angry, and Stiles does not care if Derek wants to be mad at him. 

He goes around the side of the hotel to where there are some shrubs, and he crouches down and presses his face into his knees, wrapping his arms around his legs so he can shut the world out, curling in on himself. 

Stiles grew up learning about familiars. He grew up knowing that they were sacred bonds, and he always imagined himself getting a best friend or a boyfriend or even a pet that would be there for him no matter what. He spent all of his life daydreaming about it, and they just … never came. For so long, for so long, Stiles has believed that there was something wrong with him, or that because he was only a half-witch that meant he wouldn’t get to have one. The devastation on his sixteenth birthday when no one came, no one was revealed to him, nothing…no one but a witch would be able to understand that kind of rejection. It was painful. 

Now, to find out it’s been fucking Derek Hale this entire time hiding in plain sight, withholding the information, lying, fucking him and pretending it doesn’t mean anything…its is a kind of betrayal, so strong it doubles him over. He cries, silent, holding himself.


	4. Hindsight 20/20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I rewrote this chapter probably three times until I was sick of looking at it so hopefully it’s not just a mish mash of words that don’t make any sense lmfao

When he comes back to the hotel room, it is only because he has no other way to get home. If he had his way, he’d be on the next flight back to BH without a word said to either Laura or Derek, because what they have done is just fucking terrible. Stiles is angry, and sad, and betrayed, and about a million other different emotions. But he doesn’t know anyone else here and he’s out here all by himself with no one but Derek to help him get home, so here he is, walking into the wolf’s den. Literally.

Laura and Derek are sitting on the edge of the bed – it looks like they’ve been sitting there talking for a long time, as long as Stiles has been gone. He wonders what it is they talked about, if Derek is unforgivably angry with Laura for doing all this and sharing his secrets and manipulating both of them, or if he’s just resigned to it because he at least has always known that she actually is a fucking crazy bitch. When Stiles comes in, they both stop talking and turn to look at him. Laura smiles faintly at him, likely to try and earn his good graces, but Derek just looks at him. 

He does not look very happy. But then, he never really does. 

“Stiles, you should know,” Laura starts, and Stiles really doesn’t want to hear it, not from her. “I never meant for it to turn out like….” She trails off, because there aren’t really words to describe how it has all turned out. Stiles cannot fathom how she imagined it would go, how she could have possibly seen it going any other way but the worst possible way. 

“Really, I just want to go home, so,” he gestures to the door, to Derek, meaning _let’s go, let’s fucking go._ When Derek stands up, he almost thinks that he’s getting his way after all, but then Derek goes and says the worst possible thing he could fucking say.

“Can I speak to you outside?” 

Stiles makes a face. “Uh, no?”

Derek moves forward anyway, and he takes Stiles by his upper arm and starts pulling him away towards the door. Stiles moves only because what is he supposed to do? Be alone in here with Laura, who stabbed him with a ceremonial knife just to make a fucking point?

Both the Hales are fucking nut jobs. Stiles thought Laura was well adjusted – well, she isn’t. 

They go outside, and once the door slams closed behind them, Derek starts. 

“You used that controlling spell on me,” he says, and he’s angry about it, and it’s insane, totally bonkers, that Derek can stand there and be angry at Stiles about any single thing on planet earth.

“Because you’d never tell me the truth otherwise, would you? You would’ve been happy to just lie, and lie, and lie, and lie and –“

“You’ve always said you don’t use those spells lightly.”

“You don’t even understand what you’ve done to me,” he hisses, pointing to his chest, his heart, where the pain is the worst. “You and your _wolf_ sister do not understand what this is like for me,” and he says _wolf_ like it’s a dirty word, like in this moment it really does disgust him, and Derek does not miss that, not for one second. “Do you even know what a familiar is?”

Derek rubs his hands up and down his face, two, three times, and looks miserable. “I know it’s something like being a soulmate.”

“No,” Stiles steps closer to him, so close they’re sharing each other’s breaths, and Derek stays put, like he’s too paralyzed to move. “We are made out of the same stuff, do you get that? What made you, made me. We are linked from birth, from before, from always. You were supposed to be my –“ he chokes up, looks away. This, again, is a humiliation, to have to say this to Derek Hale, to have to cry in front of him. “…you were supposed to be there for me and instead you fucked it off and you made me feel like there was something _wrong with me_. You will never understand, you will never get it, this is _sacred_ to me, my family, and you acted like it was some burden you didn’t want to deal with. Can you imagine how that feels?”

There is no shortage of shitty feelings or guilt in Derek Hale’s body. Stiles recognizes the instantaneous terrible feeling, of being the worst person alive, of realizing he has done something horrible, something he can never take back. Stiles has seen it on his face before. 

“You were so fucking angry at it having to be me.”

“No,” Derek argues immediately, shaking his head very resolutely. “No, it was nothing like that, Stiles.”

“Then what was it? You ruined something that is so critical to who I am, and I want to know why!” 

“Stiles, it’s me,” he points to himself, both index fingers jabbing into his chest. “It’s me. I’m fucking – I am a terrible fucking asshole. I was a terrible fucking asshole when you were sixteen and I was just an idiot and I wasn’t – I couldn’t –“ he opens and closes his mouth, searching for the words. “I couldn’t be that for you, and I knew it. You were a kid, and I was…and then when you weren’t a kid anymore, I was still awful. I kept thinking, when I’m not anymore, then I’ll tell him. But I just am. I just am, and I didn’t want you to be stuck with me.”

Stiles imagines that when Derek woke up on Stiles’ sixteenth birthday and knew in that intrinsic way, the way Stiles just knows things sometimes, that he was Stiles’ familiar without barely even knowing what that was, he tried to hide. He imagines that he couldn’t deal with it, because just five years earlier his entire family burned to death and he had nothing to offer nothing to give, and Stiles was just a kid. Really. He tries to put himself in Derek’s shoes, and he is empathetic, so of course he understands the reasoning. 

But it is no excuse. Derek doesn’t know what he’s done. 

“I am stuck with you whether you ever told me or not, that’s what you don’t get,” he sniffles, wiping at a tear and looking away, down the hall. “I’ve spent all this time…all this time waiting, and then you really had the balls to get me to have sex with you, to…”

Derek puts his hand on his mouth and has this far away look in his eyes. As though he is transporting himself somewhere else, or to someone else. To who he was when he was sixteen, to who he was when he was stable and rational and could handle something like this, could be nice, could be someone Stiles could rely on. That person is not here anymore. Derek does not know how to get him back. 

“I just want to go home.”

Derek nods, once, barely at all. “I’ll get you on a flight, I’ll take you to the airport,” he says, all gruff and serious. Stiles knows this is another one of his weird gestures. Because he will not say he’s sorry because maybe he’s not capable of doing so and he will not try to make it up to him, but he will pay for Stiles’ flight to get the hell away from him and his sister, as though it is the same as being sorry. Stiles wonders what Derek will do here with his sister. Then again, he really doesn’t care, not one bit, what Derek plans to do with himself now that Stiles won’t be here anymore. 

When Derek takes Stiles to the airport, driving him up to the drop off point after finagling him a ticket on the next available flight to California with all that useless money he has, he stops Stiles before he gets out of the car, with a big hand on Stiles’ forearm. The car that they’ve been in together for almost two weeks, sharing the same space and the same breaths and everything, everything together.

He looks Stiles right in the eyes. “You know where to find me,” he says, and he means it. This promise to be there for whatever Stiles needs whenever he needs it, no matter what, even in spite of everything, even if Stiles fucking hates him forever. 

Stiles does know and he has always known where to find Derek Hale. But he doesn’t plan on going looking any time soon. Derek must know that.

**

“He’s alive!” Scott is jumping up and down on the front porch of their shared house, as Stiles steps out of the cab with his bag after paying the fare with the crumpled up 20’s that Derek had shoved at him. “He lives!”

Stiles throws his bag over his shoulder and slams the door behind him, stepping up onto the pavement of the sidewalk, then the cobblestone walkway leading to their front porch steps. Allison comes outside too and waves, relieved that Stiles is not dead, while Scott bounds down the steps and comes at Stiles full speed, gearing up to wrap him up in a big bear hug like they haven’t seen each other in months. 

Scott gets within three feet of him, and his smile falters, just slightly. Then, his entire face falls as he screeches to a stop, taking Stiles by his shoulders and examining him, like there’s something wrong with him. He leans in, and sniffs. “Holy shit,” he says, and he does not sound happy about it, pulling back to look Stiles in the face. “He’s all over you, he’s –“ he stops, because he already knows. Can smell it all over him, even with all the competing scents of other strangers and the airplane. “What the _fuck_?”

He spots the bruises on Stiles’ neck and attacks those, pressing on them with his fingers, as though he’s checking to make sure they’re real and not just some joke makeup Stiles had applied to give him a heart attack. 

“You two _had sex_?” 

Allison hadn’t known what all the hubbub was about at first; now, she does. She is shocked, taking the steps two at a time down into the yard to come and meet them down there. 

“You know, I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. He tries to move forward, to his house, his bed, that he’s been dreaming about for weeks, but they both block him. 

“You had sex with Derek?” He demands again, because he can’t focus on the fact that Stiles is miserably sad and not in the mood, not with the reeking scent of Derek Hale all over him. “Stiles, you had _sex with Derek_?”

“Stiles,” Allison has this tone, this really disappointed tone. All she says is his name, that’s it, but Stiles can read between the lines. She is saying, _for fuck’s sake I know having sex with random guys is fun for you but this is not a random guy this is Derek Hale, this is Derek fucking Hale_. 

Stiles looks between the two of them and he knows that he really has no excuse. Or, that he does, but it’s complicated and too much to explain. Stiles just wants to get into his bed, curl under the covers, and sleep until he’s dead so none of this matters anymore. Instead of saying anything, he stands there and thinks about crying again. 

His lower lip trembles and that, Scott catches. He kind of deflates, so he’s not this big angry bubble anymore, softening around the eyes. With a huge sigh, he rubs at his face, takes a deep breath, realizes that this is no time for him to be angry, because Stiles is upset. “Come on,” he says, voice much softer, taking Stiles by the shoulders. “Let’s go sit down.” 

Inside, it’s just the same as Stiles left it. The furniture the same, the rooms the same, the smell of him and Scott combined still wafting in the air along with Allison’s much fainter perfume. For some reason, Stiles had expected to come in and find everything shifted, completely different. He feels like he is different, though he was only gone for a couple of weeks. Those days on the road with Derek have changed him, somehow. 

Stiles thumps his bag down on the ground and collapses into one of the chairs at the kitchen table, leaning forward to press his head into his hands. Scott and Allison sit down across from him and wait for him to say something. It is a long while before he does, but he tells them the whole story. He tells them about the nightmares and the time card, and how Derek never told him the truth for one solitary second the entire time. He tells them about the sex and how Derek marked him and then acted like it wasn’t a big deal, how Laura stabbed him with the ceremonial knife from the Hales of the olden days, how the Hales burned witches at the stake, how Stiles’ mother hated wolves, the whole nine yards. 

All of it. It sounds even crazier when it is spoken out loud, that Derek is his familiar. But it just is. Stiles knows it.

**

Stiles’ bedroom is the furthest one down, at the end of the hall. It is covered from floor to ceiling with books, mostly. Trinkets from the magic shop. Magic rocks. Cards. He has candles up the ass and incense and also a stuffed dinosaur plush from when he was a kid, sitting on a shelf over his bed, watching him when he sleeps. Once he gets to his bed after telling the story of what happened on the road trip to find Laura, he stays there for a full twenty-four hours, wallowing in his own bad feelings until the sheets are soaked with them.

Scott had been mad, shocked, confused, reluctant to believe that any of it was true. On the surface, it seems to make no logical sense whatsoever – that Derek and Stiles would be linked in any way shape or form, let alone in the way that they actually are. Stiles thought maybe they were meant to be in each other’s life for some reason or another, because all signs pointed to that being the case. 

This is not what he had in mind. Scott is mad about it, of course he is, anyone would be; what Derek and Laura did to him was horrible. Laura was manipulative and used Derek’s loneliness against him. Derek was a liar and he slept with Stiles, again and again, knowing how wrong it was to do so given the circumstances. None of it was fair. It makes Stiles seem like an idiot, and he feels like one, to have not seen it coming all along. 

The fucking Hales. They are so emotionally screwed up. 

Stiles does not leave his room for two days straight. He sits in his desk chair and presses his forehead against the wood, and he searches his soul. He looks as deep as he can, into the very depths of himself, looking for something, some form of proof that what Derek had said was the truth. Now that he knows what he’s looking for, it isn’t even that hard to find. It’s there, buried deep underneath layers of himself he’s always too afraid to look at – faint and distant, but there all the same. 

The tiniest little fire. A spark, an ember. Derek is fire in Stiles’ dreams, and fire in real life in how angry and unpredictable he is, and fire inside of Stiles’ body. Stiles doesn’t know what to do with that, the fire inside of him from someone else, so he does a sleep spell on himself in the middle of the day and goes back to bed, so he doesn’t have to think about it much at all. 

He dreams of being in the ocean, the fire all around him, but this time he doesn’t fight it, or try to swim to the surface, or anything. He lets himself sink to the bottom, into the sand, where he sits and watches the fire burn, distorted and distant under the water. He drowns. 

Stiles knows that if he ever made it to the surface, he would find Derek in the fire, somewhere. His shadow, lurking among the trees, all the way across town having the same exact nightmare. Stiles imagines that Derek burns in his dreams because it is what he believes he deserves. 

When he wakes up, he turns over and his bedside clock reads 3:13 AM, blinking at him eerily in the darkness of his bedroom. He sits up and the candles on his desk are lit, flickering at him almost as though they are gesturing for him to come closer. In the center, the time card sits and whispers at him. 

Groggily, he stands and then sits down in his chair, taking the card into his hands and sighing through his nose. Without thinking about it, he pulls the rest of his deck out and shuffles them along with time, fanning them out. He hasn’t done an actual reading on himself since all this nonsense started – honestly, he had figured the only thing he needed to know was that he was running out of time for something, seeing as how it was the single card he ever managed to pull. Now, he pulls four cards, placing them face up in a line as they reveal themselves to him. Stiles stares at the results, stares for a long time, and he understands it. Finally, after all of this, he gets it. 

He’s gotten time, the chain, the moon, and the dog. It’s so obvious he wants to punch himself in the face for never seeing it sooner – but how could he have, when everything is given to him in cryptic symbols and signs? The dog usually refers to a bad omen, a black, scraggly looking thing with red eyes and a ferocious grin. Stiles always thought it meant that he was marked by the devil or something when he would pull it, not that there was a literal _dog_ of sorts out there that he was meant to go out and find. The cards aren’t usually so fucking direct, so he’d gone hunting for symbolism instead of what was right in front of him in plain English. 

The moon, also, is obvious. 

It’s the chain and time that finally tie the entire thing together. The time card is the same as always, the thing that has been haunting him like a ghost, clock arms ticking and ticking over his head; coupled with the chain, it takes on a different meaning. Stiles had interpreted it to literally mean, time. An hour glass, a clock, sand disappearing between his fingers. In a way, it does. 

It’s the chain of fate. The unbreakable link of what has always been, what is now, what will always be. There is no hourglass with disappearing sand, no countdown clock, nothing that he’s racing against. Time has stood still, waiting for him. 

“He is such a fucking asshole,” Stiles mutters to himself as he puts his deck back together, the time card sitting on top, staring back at him. Because he is, really he is. He’s made a mess of everything. Stiles understands, now, why he had seen that forest fire burning in Colorado, all those days ago. It was not a coincidence they were driving by right as it caught up, right as the smoke was billowing onto the highway. 

Derek has been executing a controlled burn this entire time, without Stiles ever realizing it. He had tried to burn away the part of him that was linked to Stiles, using time to do so. He thought that if he waited long enough, the fire that’s inside of both of them would burn everything until there was nothing left of it – he had been hoping it would just go away. It never did. It never will.

**

Stiles’ childhood house sits on the edge of the woods, which in hindsight was sort of a sign in and of itself. The woods are so close that the branches of a big oak tree would scratch against his window in the middle of the night, like fingers, sometimes waking him up to open it up and stare out into the darkness of the trees, as though he were looking for something, out there. He had always chalked it up to witchy nonsense, voices that weren’t really there, the eerie clairvoyance telling him to put on his shoes and go find someone out there.

When he opens the front door his dad is in the living room, reading the morning paper, drinking coffee. He is pleased beyond all belief to see Stiles standing there in the foyer, even though Stiles has got bloodshot eyes from forcing himself to sleep again and again, mussed hair, a shirt he’s worn three days in a row. “Stiles!” He greets, putting his paper down to stand up and wrap his son up in a big, long overdue hug. 

“Hi, dad,” Stiles says into his chest, and when they pull apart, the Sheriff really looks at him. Takes him in, all the way – no one knows him like his father does, so instantly, he knows something is wrong. 

“You look like hell,” he says, no use in sparing Stiles’ feelings. “How was that road trip you went on with that Hale character? Bad?”

“A nightmare,” Stiles smiles with all his teeth, even though it’s not funny, not really at all. “Derek Hale is a bad sort.”

“He is,” the Sheriff agrees. He picks his coffee back up from the table and sips it, thoughtful. “There’s always been something about that kid that rubs me the wrong way. Even before all those bad things happened to his family, there was something off about him.”

Stiles looks somewhere at an imaginary camera. Of course there was always some unidentifiable thing _off_ with Derek. Hindsight really is having a field day. 

“What brings you to my neck of the woods? Need another one of your spooky books?” 

Stiles does, as a matter of fact, keep a portion of his personal library in his old kid bedroom because there simply isn’t enough room for it all at his shared house with Scott. If he tried to bring it all into their tiny house, it would spill out into the hallway, into the kitchen. They’d have to move aside books to sit down and eat, use piles as chairs. 

But, no, that is not why he’s here. 

“I actually need to uh,” he rubs the back of his neck, because this is sort of a Big Ask. “…I need to talk to mom.” 

His father lowers his coffee mug, and gives Stiles a long, hard look. It’s as though he’s trying to figure out what it is that’s wrong with his son, from a look alone. “I see.” 

Stiles had meant it when he said he tries to avoid dabbling in the dark magic of the paranormal at all costs; it does not bode well for a witch who spends too much time playing around with the underworld. Lots of them go crazy, or get sucked into hell, or wind up cursed, fooling with forces they don’t fully understand. Stiles does not make a habit out of talking to the dead or summoning spirits. 

Just his mother. It is different where she’s concerned, because they’re blood kin and share the same magic like sharing the same eyes. But all the same, Stiles can only call her up once a year, and typically, he and his father do it on Christmas Eve. It spooks the ever living pants off of his dad, like all things witch tend to do to him, but it’s a tradition and it’s nice to see her, even if she is…dead. 

“It must be very important, if you’re using your token early.”

“I would not be asking if it weren’t,” Stiles assures him. “I know it’s – I know then we won’t get to see her like we normally do, but I just…she’s the only one who would know what to do, and I need her help.” 

His dad waves his arm. “Say no more,” he says, reaching out to pat Stiles on the shoulder a couple of times. “Do what you got to do. The magic is you and your mother’s special thing, so you can have your time with her his year, alone.” 

Though he never understood magic or where it comes from or how it works, the Sheriff had married one anyway. He’s unbelievably simple; he likes his breakfast the same every day, his coffee the same, his job, his desk, this tiny little town – all of it the same every single day, routine down to the numbers. Somehow he had wound up with Stiles’ mother, who was crazy and never lived the same day twice. It is a wonder that he ever managed to live with it, but when she was gone, it was like losing half of himself. 

Stiles’ father wasn’t his mother’s familiar. Not everyone gets a person. She had a raven. It is buried next to her in the back yard. When she died, it curled its wings in on itself and dropped dead, too – like its broken heart had killed it. He wonders if when Stiles dies, Derek’s broken heart will kill him, too. 

Stiles goes out the back door and walks the familiar path to the woods, where just on the outskirts, there is a grave stone marked with her name, a bed of flowers that never die no matter the weather or time of year resting right beside it. The neighbors think this is the weirdest fucking thing, to have a dead body buried right next to the house, but that’s because they’re human and normal and boring, and they’ll never understand it. 

He gets down on his knees right in front of the stone and presses his fingers in, tracing the letters of her name. He knows that his father is watching from the kitchen window, drinking his coffee and listening to every word – he wants to know what the hell is going on, but is too chickenshit to ask for fear it’s some witchy stuff he doesn’t want to hear about. It is, but that’s his cross to bear, really. 

Stiles presses his hands into the grass, and closes his eyes. Calling someone up from the spirit world isn’t easy; typically, Stiles would have to perform a whole ritual, with snakes and dead deer and all this other really scary nonsense. But with Stiles’ mother, because she is so close inside of him, he just needs to find her and bring her up. 

This spell only lasts for five minutes. But it’s just enough time, it always is just enough time, for Stiles to get what he needs from her. 

There is dead silence, and the wind stills, but he doesn’t open his eyes. He stays still as a statue, pressing his hands into the earth where her body lies, and breathes in and out, steady. The wind starts up again, blowing through the trees hard and fast, so the wind chimes on the back porch go crazy and loud in Stiles’ ears like they always do. 

A hand, cold like ice, presses against his cheek. “Christmas time already? Seems kind of warm.”

Stiles opens his eyes, and there she is. She is striking, not just because she was beautiful, but because she is dead, and looks it. She’s in the clothes they buried her in, a floor length straight black gown, sleeves to the elbows, a diamond necklace hanging by her collarbones. She’s got a big gash in her head that is always bleeding whenever Stiles pulls her forward, because what killed her is a connection to the physical world that she needs to cross over – a mortal wound, the last proof she has of having ever been alive at all. 

“It’s not Christmas,” he tells her, and she looks surprised. She kneels down in front of him, so they are at eye level, and looks him right in his face. It is eerie, unnerving, because she has no life in her eyes – a listless, bizarre stare that goes right through him, like he’s the one who is a ghost. 

“You are sad,” she assesses easily, taking his face in both of her hands and cradling it. It’s almost uncomfortable, because she’s so cold, but Stiles would never ask her to take her hands away. 

“I need your help,” he tells her, and she blinks at him. “I don’t know what to do, I – I found my familiar.” 

This pleases her; she smiles. 

“It’s a werewolf.”

This does not please her. She frowns so deeply her face almost falls off, and for a moment, she seems almost to become someone else. She did really hate werewolves, after all. “It’s not that Derek Hale, is it?”

Stiles’ jaw nearly hits the ground – he cocks his head to the side and looks at her, up and down, as if checking to make sure it’s really her. “How did you –“

“I always knew there was something wrong with that boy,” she grits her teeth and shakes her head, like she’s mad enough to spit, at the thought of a werewolf putting their hands all over her son. 

“What do I do?” He asks her, and she removes her hands from his face and folds them in her lap, looking serious. “He – he’s not exactly…he just really hurt me. He lied to me for a long time.” 

“Of course he did,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “Men are dogs, none worse than wolves.” 

“Mom,” he reaches out and takes one of her hands in his, cutting her off before she goes on another one of her anti-werewolf tangents and wastes his time with her, “what do I do about this?” 

“Oh, Stiles,” she shakes her head at him. “What do you mean, what do you do about it? Nothing. He’s your familiar. There is nothing that you can do about that.” 

“But he’s –“

“I was never fortunate enough to have a person as my familiar,” she interrupts, her eyes going far away. Stiles wonders if she might be looking in the window, where Stiles’ father is standing, looking right back at her. “I just got lucky, with your dad. But even what I had with your father couldn’t come close to what I had with my familiar. And that was just a bird,” she smiles at him, all serene and all-knowing, like she’s got the secrets of the universe. She knew everything when she was alive, too. “As much as it pains me to say it, you two belong to each other. It’s just…how it is.” Stiles notices it when she starts to fade away, and she does too. She looks down at her hands, becoming more ghostly, apparitional, drifting into nothing, and then looks back up to Stiles’ face. “You are so much like me. I know you’ll be fine, even with a werewolf.” 

Stiles never wants him mom to go, even though he knows she always has to. No matter how many times he’s done this spell, no matter how many times he sees it, it is still painful to watch her evaporate, like she was never here at all. “I’ll tell dad you say hi,” he says, and then she’s gone. 

He is alone. He sits down all the way, bringing his knees up to his chest, and stares at her headstone. Somewhere underneath his body, her skeleton lies, tucked inside a coffin with the remains of a raven. Her best friend. Stiles misses her so bad it’s like losing his arm, to see her go, to not have her here to tell him what to say to Derek when they see each other again. 

He sniffles and wipes at his face, annoyed that he’s crying at all. Again. 

The grass crunches behind him with footsteps, and then his father is there, crouching down and looking him right in his face. He smiles, thin. “So, uh. Derek Hale, huh?”

Stiles scoffs, wiping at his eyes some more. Of course he was listening. “Unfortunately, yes. He is an unbelievable asshole with no emotional range whatsoever, and he is not very nice, but somehow, he’s my familiar.” 

“Huh,” his father thinks about it for a moment, and then he shrugs. “Better late than never?”

“Better a wolf than nothing,” he agrees, and his dad helps him stand up to his full height, wrapping his arm around his shoulders and leading him into the house. 

“How about some breakfast?”

**

Stiles gathers up the stones to go visit Derek the morning after he had spoken to his mother. What she had said was true, like everything that she says is – obviously, there is not really a whole hell of a lot that Stiles can do about the fact that Derek is his familiar. He cannot pretend like it’s not true, because the nightmares are getting bad again, without Derek in bed to stave them off. He cannot hate Derek forever because he literally can’t, his heart will not allow it. He can’t shut Derek out forever, he cannot just go on with his life knowing what he knows now.

He goes to the loft and finds it empty and dusty. Derek hasn’t been here for months, maybe even longer than that. Stiles blinks at it all abandoned like that, and realizes how little he’s ever really paid attention to Derek in the past, even with all of the signs around the two of them, forcing them together. He hadn’t even know the guy had moved, for fuck’s sake. 

He has no clue where a man like Derek goes and gets a house, so when he gets out to his car, he reaches in through the open passenger side window to paw around in his glove box until he finds his old map of Beacon Hills. He lays it out on the hood of his car and cracks his fingers; it’s been a long time since he’s performed this particular spell, because these days, he knows where everything and everyone he gives a shit about is at any given time.

Well, almost everyone. 

After he speaks the incantation, the map stays the same, for just a second, with the familiar mountains and rivers and street names. Then, a small spider climbs up on top of it and pads over to the far side, down an old dirt road, to the woods – not terribly far from where the old Hale house burned down, all those years ago. Of course, Derek has some weird shanty house in the fucking woods. Why wouldn’t he? 

Stiles picks the spider up on his index finger and deposits him on a nearby tree, folds his map up, and climbs back into his Jeep. He drives across town to where the buildings and houses thin out into long stretches of woods, each house a half mile apart from one another, turning down onto a dirt road that Stiles used to ride his bike on when he was younger. It’s bumpy and filled with big gaping holes, so he has to drive slow to avoid popping a tire, his top-heavy Jeep bouncing over rocks and the like.

There are actually a handful of other houses out here, because Derek Hale is not the only man on earth who values his privacy and likes the woods, but they’re separated by a good amount of foliage and space. Stiles knows Derek’s house when he sees it on instinct alone – not to mention, his car is parked in the dirt driveway out front. Stiles pulls in right behind it and shuts his engine off, biting his lip and staring at the house for a moment or two. 

It’s not bad. It’s small, but then it is just Derek in there, so he doesn’t need that much space. It’s green, so it almost blends into its surroundings, with a small porch that’s got a bench and a couple of well taken care of plants. Stiles climbs out, and he knows that Derek knows that he’s here. He probably heard the bumbling of the Jeep all the way down the road. Who knows what he thought when he realized Stiles was here? 

Was he happy? Relieved? Mad? 

Up the front steps he goes, walking right up to the door. He bangs on it, twice, and then stuffs his hands into his pockets just because he doesn’t know what to do with them. Derek opens the door, takes in Stiles in his entirety; head to toe, top to bottom. It’s almost as though he’s checking to make sure Stiles is still in one piece, still okay. 

“You know, typically when someone gets mad at you, you’re supposed to seek them out, not the other way around,” Stiles reminds him.

Derek frowns. “I figured you didn’t want to see me very much. You just,” he waves his hand, “left.” 

Of course Stiles just left New York. What the hell was he supposed to do, there with Laura and Derek? Sit around trying to hash out the issues with one of the worst things that has ever been done to him? Stiles says, “well, I had to get away from that situation.”

“Laura feels very bad,” he says, voice cautious, as though he’s nervous to be bringing up her name in front of him. “She should.” 

Yes, she should. But then, Stiles has to imagine that if Laura had never done that, it would have been years, decades even, before Derek would have ever had the courage to say anything to Stiles. Stiles never would have been in a situation to be alone with Derek Hale for weeks at a time never would have slept with him, never would have gotten stabbed with the Hale knife, none of it. 

She was right, but that doesn’t mean she should have done it. 

Derek gestures for Stiles to come inside, moving aside to give him room to walk by. 

It is pretty much what Stiles had always expected. It’s even smaller than it looked from the outside – just four rooms. A kitchen connected to a living room with a tiny table, only two chairs. A bathroom, a bedroom. Nothing special, but it does have a particular homey touch to it. Derek’s kitchen is filled with cook books and fancy utensils, his living room has a very cozy couch with tons of blankets and soft pillows, a big television. 

Derek closes the door behind them, so then they’re just standing there like two people who barely know one another. In more ways than one, they don’t fucking know each other, not even a little bit. But in even more ways, it’s like they’ve always known each other, from before. From another life, maybe. Stiles was a tree and Derek was the squirrel who lived there, or something really silly like that. 

“You want to…” Stiles points to the couch, and Derek nods. 

They sit down next to one another, and Stiles reaches into the pocket of his hoody and produces an old, folded up piece of paper that he had pulled from one of his books before leaving the house this morning. He unfolds it, revealing ink and parchment, smoothing it out on Derek’s coffee table on top of old mail and a cooking magazine. “This is a sacred text,” he explains to Derek, who is looking curiously over Stiles’ shoulder. “My mother gave it to me when I was old enough to understand what it said. It’s the first time I ever learned about, uh, what a familiar even is, and I thought since maybe your werewolf literature obviously hasn’t appropriately covered it, you’d like to read it.” 

Derek looks at it. “It is not in English.” 

“Oh,” Stiles laughs – he had forgotten that Derek can’t read Latin. Most people can’t, which he forgets about very often, so he clears his throat and uses his finger to keep track of his place as he reads it aloud. “Your soul was split in two when you were made, the other half given away to another. For as long as you live, you will not know who you are until you find your other half –“

“I think I get the idea,” Derek interrupts, and Stiles looks up from the writing to look him in his face. “These kinds of things don’t make sense to me.”

“What does make sense to you?”

“You always say how –“ he stutters, like this is hard for him to say – Stiles does him the courtesy of giving him his full attention, waiting patiently. “…I don’t get magic, I’ll never get it, I wouldn’t get it.” 

“Because you will never get it.”

“Well, there are things about werewolves you will never understand.”

Stiles blinks. Truth be told, he sort of has been a bit of an arrogant asshole, and has never fully considered that angle. Oh, he’s spent tons of time telling Derek he’s too fucking stupid to understand anything about Stiles’ lineage, his family, his power, his blood, this that and the other thing. But never once has he ever taken the time to realize that Derek also has an entire gene pool and existence that Stiles just…can’t understand, because he was raised differently. Is different, entirely. 

Derek may be Stiles’ familiar, but that’s just Stiles’ half of the deal. For Derek, there is another word for it, in his culture. 

“…it means something else, to me.”

He seems reluctant to say it out loud. Stiles clears his throat and gestures for Derek to continue, even though to do so, it seems like Derek is going to have to pull his own teeth out of his skull for all that he clearly doesn’t want to keep talking. 

“That knife that Laura stabbed you with, it’s uh…” he fumbles again, likely because he never imagined he’d really be having this conversation with Stiles. “…it’s a traditional bonding knife. It’s made out of steel that’s got my family’s blood in it, so when it went into you and your blood was all over it, it symbolized you and I – our, you know.”

Stiles does not know, so Derek huffs all aggravated. He actually goes a bit red, like this is really embarrassing for him to have to say out loud. 

”…our blood bond.”

Stiles snaps his fingers and says _a-ha_! “So that’s what you call it. It only took you weeks to finally pluck up the courage to say it out loud.” 

Derek is peeved, very evidently so, but he doesn’t say anything else for a moment. The bloody knife, the shared nightmares, the marking in the shower, the absolutely buck wild sex – part of that does come from Derek being Stiles’ familiar, yes, but a much larger part of the really primal animalistic parts of what’s going on between them is all Derek’s werewolf blood bond nonsense. 

“Your people say that we are two halves of the same soul, well, mine say that we have the same blood,” he holds his arm out and points to the junction between his forearm and his upper arm, where a nurse might poke a needle to draw blood. “And I didn’t know that, until your sixteenth birthday. I knew there was something about you, but I…you are just strange, so I chalked it up to that.” 

“You know, Derek,” Stiles sits up all the way, and turns his body to face the other man head on, so they met eyes. Again, Derek’s eye contact is unsettling. “I get not wanting to pounce on me when I was sixteen, but when I became an adult, and you still treated me like I had the plague, and you still didn’t come find me…that really hurt me, that you did that.” 

Derek looks at his hands, where he has them clasped in between his legs. “I am shit,” he says, and he means it. “I didn’t want you to get dragged down with me.” 

“What Laura did was really terrible,” Stiles tacks on, and Derek lifts his eyebrows like _you’re telling me_.

“She is a crazy fucking bitch,” he shakes his head. “Everyone thinks she’s the normal one because she can smile.”

Stiles snorts – that is hilarious, because yup, that is precisely what everyone thinks about her. They figure she’s well-adjusted because she goes outside and can be friendly when presented with other people. In reality, she’s just as messed up as Derek is, if not somewhat more. Derek is more honest about it, is all. 

Derek looks at his hands some more, and then clears his throat. “Did you..” he starts, stops, starts up again. “…were you really waiting, all this time?”

With a sad smile, Stiles nods. “Every witch has a familiar, no matter how small. They’re supposed to come on your sixteenth, but sometimes they’re a little late, so I…and then years went by so I thought, you know,” he shrugs, “I was just defective. The way my mother would talk about it, about hers, I just – I just wanted it, really bad.” 

There’s this all-consuming guilty look on Derek’s face again, and Stiles has seen it so many times in so many different situations for so many different reasons, that he’s almost becoming immune to it, anymore. It is the first time that he says it, since everything happened, since that terrible conversation in the Holiday Inn hallway where he pushed money at Stiles instead of saying much of anything at all, but he does finally say it. “I’m sorry.” 

“So you do know how to say that, after all,” Stiles teases, lightly, but he can’t tease too much. He knows how hard it is for Derek to be vulnerable, even in front of Stiles. Maybe especially in front of Stiles. “I can’t really stay mad, unfortunately. I really want to, like really bad, but I just…can’t be.” 

“Well,” Derek is serious when he says, “I want _you_ really bad, so we’re even.” 

“You mean –“

“I mean since we’ve been apart all I have thought about is fucking you.”

“Oh,” Stiles is surprised into stunned silence, his face going hot. He kind of figured that was Derek’s favorite thing about Stiles, just judging by how it was when they were on their trip, because he was very…intense about it, let’s say. Stiles is used to come-ons and guys finagling their way into his pants and saying all manner of really nasty things to him, but when Derek says things like this, it takes him off guard. Because Derek is…Derek. 

Really, though, the only way he’s ever shown Stiles how he feels about him is through fucking. It seems to just be how he shows it. 

“Well, do you want to –“

Stiles doesn’t even get the chance to finish that sentence. Derek gets up and grabs Stiles, fully grabs him, manhandling him up into Derek’s arms – so Stiles has to wrap his legs around Derek’s middle for leverage, his arms around his neck, holding on tight. They kiss, that same insane shit from the hotel rooms, where it’s like they’re trying to see who can devour who the fastest; Derek’s tongue presses into Stiles throat, so Stiles coughs, sputters, but goes in for more, anyway. All the while, Derek is walking him across the room, through a doorway, then unceremoniously tossing Stiles onto his bed.

It’s big. It’s got dark blue sheets and fluffy pillows and it reeks, absolutely stinks to high heavens, of Derek Hale and werewolf. 

Derek rips his shirt off above Stiles, then goes for his belt buckle with frantic fingers. Stiles stares up at him and watches, because why the hell not? But then Derek barks, “what are you doing?”, at him, so he startles. “Take your fucking clothes off.” 

“Oh,” he is quick to tug his own shirt off and toss it aside, then fumbles with his belt. For some reason, he can’t get it; maybe because his fingers are shaking and Derek is watching him, kneeing his way onto the bed fully naked with an already throbbing dick, but either way, it’s not happening. He huffs and twirls his finger in the air, so the belt comes undone of its own volition, his button comes undone, the zipper. 

Derek says, “you can do that?”

“I can do absolutely anything,” he says, and within reason, he really means it. 

With big hands, Derek hefts Stiles up by his hips and makes quick work of tugging Stiles’ jeans and boxers off of his body, throwing them away like he’s more irritated by them than anything else. He pulls Stiles close, flush against his body, leaning down and biting him gently on the neck. Stiles angles back and moans, so Derek bites harder. To the point that it hurts, that Stiles grabs onto him and cants his hips up into him. 

“I want to fucking bite you so bad,” he growls, and Stiles huffs out a confused laugh. 

“You just did.”

“No, I mean _bite you_.”

Like, as a werewolf. Bite him. Stiles is confused by this proclamation, because the last time he checked, being bitten by a werewolf means that you sorta…become one. Does Derek want Stiles to be a werewolf, like him? “You know you can’t turn me, right?” Witches cannot become anything else - if Derek bit him or if a vampire did, nothing would happen, because witch blood is toxic enough to kill that sort of a thing. Or, so they say. 

He expects Derek to be surprised – instead, he gives Stiles a look. “Exactly my point.”

“Oh.” Oh. So Derek wants to use his real fangs and bite Stiles’ neck so he bleeds just so he can leave his mark on him, nothing more, nothing less. This is a huge ask, a really big one, and Derek knows that, which is why he has not done it yet and likely will not do it until Stiles directly asks him to. It’s kind of sick, really twisted as a matter of fact, that Stiles does not entirely hate the idea. 

It is actually kind of…hot. Which is strange, because Stiles has never been a person deeply attracted to the idea of someone truly hurting him. But then, it wouldn’t be like that. Derek would probably bite him, draw blood, and then lave his tongue over it to heal it over into a scar, and that… Yeah. Okay. 

Derek flips Stiles over, onto his belly. He reaches over to his bedside table and pulls open the drawer, to reveal actual honest to god lubricant, and Stiles could cry at seeing it. Every time they fucked in hotels, there was no lube to speak of. Only Derek’s spit and determination. And while it was truly some of the best sex of his life, the rawness of it put his ass in a sling almost every single time. He hears Derek slicking himself up, feels a wet, slippery finger press inside of him. Stiles gets up onto his hands and knees without needing to be directed to do so, looking over his shoulder to watch Derek finger him, to look at his face. 

Derek meets his eyes. With his free hand, he reaches out and grabs onto Stiles’ jaw, squeezes it, almost too hard. Stiles sometimes wonders if Derek has a hard time, when they’re fucking, keeping a hold on himself, or if he forgets just how much stronger than Stiles he really is. 

He lets go, so he can angle himself up with Stiles’ entrance. It takes only one smooth pump of his hips before he’s all the way inside, to the root, thanks to the help of the lube. He pulls out, then back in gently, as if testing the waters – then, he grips onto Stiles’ hips and uses them to pull Stiles’ body onto his cock, and then off of it, instead of the other way around. 

It makes Stiles’ teeth clatter together, the force of it, until he grits them together and arches his back – digging his face into one of Derek’s pillows to try and muffle himself. Derek notices, and he pauses to take Stiles by his hair, rough, really rough, pulling his head up out of the bed and holding him there. Derek says, “don’t be shy,” and it is hot beyond, like _beyond_ , to the point where Stiles thinks he could come then and there, but holds on because he doesn’t want it to be over, yet. 

All the same, with how turned on Stiles is by Derek’s bossiness and the fucking itself, he’s close. It has barely even started, and he’s close, digging his fingernails into the sheets and whining. “I’m gonna come,” he practically shouts, and Derek has no commentary. He just keeps going, and it’s no help, none whatsoever, so he does. Come, that is. Everywhere, embarrassingly enough, on a keening noise that he doesn’t think he’s ever made before. 

After that, Stiles is pretty much a rag doll. He goes all loose and just lets Derek fuck him, so his body jerks around on the bed, his softening cock bouncing against his chest. Derek hefts him up by his hips to hold him steady, and it is amazing, really truly something, that he still has the stamina for this. Even as a werewolf, this is something else. 

Finally, Derek is finishing. He pulls out, pressing the head of his cock onto Stiles’ lower back – so when he comes, it spills on Stiles’ skin, all over him. Stiles breathes, while Derek works at literally rubbing it into Stiles’ back, like it’s lotion or something. It’s really gross, and Stiles says as much. “Yuck.”

“Shh,” Derek tells him, and Stiles does go quiet. It goes on like that for another minute or so, with Derek on his knees behind Stiles’ body, caressing his back all the way up to his neck, just letting the mark take hold on him. 

Then, Derek stops. He gently turns Stiles over, so he’s laying down on his back in Derek’s bed. He joins Stiles right next to him, flopping down with an exhausted huff, just like he always did when they were fucking in hotel rooms. Like it really takes something out of him. “You okay?” He asks, and Stiles nods.

“I’m fine,” he says. Derek’s hand fumbles around on Stiles’ chest, until he gets to his belly – the place where the knife had gone in, again. Stiles guesses he doesn’t really have to wonder what all that is about, now. 

Derek clears his throat, hesitates, and then clears his throat again. “You are welcome to sleep here tonight. It’s a long drive back to town, so.” Right. The long drive back to town is really what Derek is concerned about. 

“Sure,” Stiles agrees, turning over on his side so he can look at Derek all the way. “Have you been having nightmares, like me?”

“Yes,” he nods, staring up at the ceiling, his eyes far away. “In mine, I can never get through the fire to get you out of the water before you drown.”

“Oh,” Stiles blinks. He hadn’t known that. Only recently did he realize that Derek was in the fire, and he never would’ve thought that Stiles was in Derek’s dream. Or that really, they are the exact same dream, the exact same situation, just two different parts of one whole. “In mine, I just can’t get to the shore.”

Derek shifts his head on his pillow, so he can meet Stiles’ eyes. They stare at one another for a long time, not saying anything, just looking. “I wasted your time,” he is guilty when he says this. “I let you drown for way too long.” 

Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s arm. He strokes, up and down, so Derek turns and watches Stiles’ hand move on him like he cannot believe it, can’t believe that Stiles is here, in his bed, touching him at all. “I don’t know anything about you.”

“If you want, we can get to know each other,” he offers, and he almost seems nervous which is hilarious, laugh out loud funny, because it’s Derek fucking Hale. “If you can…if you can forgive me.” 

“You will have to make it up to me,” he taunts, raising his eyebrows. Derek smiles at him, the tiny, barely there smile that is as far as Derek ever gets in truly being happy. “I notice you seem to like cooking.”

“I love it,” he corrects.

“Then, I want dinner.”

“Okay. I will cook you dinner.” They go quiet for another couple of minutes, just basking in each other’s company. Stiles doesn’t know if he feels an invisible pull inside of himself, or if he feels like he’s exactly where he’s supposed to be, finally. But he does know that being with Derek, in bed with him, touching him, feels almost natural. Even on the road trip they’d sit and stew in silence, ignoring each other or being shitty to one another - but when it came to the sex, it always felt…automatic. It’s a complicated thing, what they have between them.

Apropos of nothing, Derek says, “I have never been with someone before, just so you know. Or, I have but…”

She burned his family alive, yeah. Since then, Derek has probably just been having lots of mindless sex with lots of mindless strangers, sort of exactly like Stiles has been doing. Never anything serious, never anyone to come home to, never anyone to ask to move in with him, never anything like this. 

“I’ve never had an actual relationship. I just couldn’t…connect with anybody. I guess now I know why.” 

Derek is nodding his head, but he won’t look Stiles in the face. After a beat, he finally looks at Stiles, and he seems curious, searching Stiles’ face. “What made you decide to come here? After what I did to you, what made you…?”

“I spoke with my mother,” he says, nonchalant, but Derek freezes.

“So, you do speak with dead people.”

“Just her, and only – only once a year,” he shrugs, like it’s not a big deal, when it is. “Because she was a witch and we’re blood kin, I can pull her up once a year, just for five minutes. Usually we make a big deal out of it at Christmas, but she was the only one I could talk to about this, because my dad knows nothing and I don’t have any other family left who are witches, like me.” 

Derek thinks about that for a while, seeming deep in thought as he fiddles with his sheet and looks across his bedroom, brow furrowed. Stiles takes this time to take a look around himself for the first time since Derek threw him on the bed; Derek’s got a bedside table with a lamp, a clock, and an old family photo in a nice frame. In it, Derek is young, smiling at the camera with his huge family, out in the woods. Stiles is embarrassed that Derek’s mother and father watched the two of them have sex, so he looks away quickly. 

He has some art on the walls, and surprisingly it’s not all moonscapes for him to howl at. He has a painting of boats, sailing away into the sun, and Stiles has to wonder if he just picked that up at a tag sale to fill in the blank spot on his wall, or if he really…likes to sail? 

Stiles honestly doesn’t know. 

“What did your mom say about me?” 

Stiles laughs, shakes his head. “Nothing good, dude, trust me. She never liked you.”

This makes Derek frown. Then, he shrugs and says, “well, my mother hated your family, so there’s that.” 

“There’s that,” Stiles agrees. Ghosts can’t really stop them, and even if they weren’t ghosts, they couldn’t stop it, either. 

Derek’s house is full of little nuggets of information about him, Stiles discovers throughout the course of the day. He has a surprisingly full book shelf with an interesting assortment of different topics – hunting, fishing, which is no surprise, but then also fiction romance novels, The Giving Tree, encyclopedias, a biography about Vincent Van Gogh. 

He has lots of pictures on the wall. Way more than anyone would expect him to. There are actually, embarrassingly enough for Derek, a couple of pictures of the fucking moon. Stiles decides not to make fun of him about it, but only for today. His kitchen is impressive, even for its small size. He has fancy cook wear and his own recipe books and a fridge _full_ of food, and it is funny, hilarious, that everyone thinks Derek is some inept loser who doesn’t know how to take care of himself. 

Derek had to learn how to take care of himself when he was sixteen years old. It shows, in the cleanliness of the space, the organizational edge he has, his neat closet, his shiny bathroom. 

He is a natural at cooking, as luck would have it. He has a duck in the fridge, like a real fucking duck, the whole thing minus its head and feathers, and Stiles is aghast. “Tell me you did not hunt and kill that thing.” 

“Of course I did,” he sets it on the counter, so Stiles can get a full look at its naked flesh, staring right back at him. “It’s the most ethical, sustainable way to eat meat, Stiles.”

He is right, but Stiles is still unbelievably grossed out. Derek can tell, because he smirks and starts butchering the thing with a huge cleaver he pulls off of the wall. “When you’re eating it, you will not care about where I got it, trust me. Plus, don’t your people sacrifice animals to the deities?”

“That’s not an offensive stereotype or anything,” he scoffs, as every slam of the cleaver into flesh makes him jump. “There are no deities. One time, _once_ , I had to kill a snake for a potion, and believe me, it keeps me awake at night.”

“You’re going to like it,” he assures Stiles, even as he cuts into the flesh and starts pulling out…guts. Stiles looks away, gagging, and moves to hide in the living room for the remainder of the cooking time. 

When it comes out all cooked and ready, Stiles is reluctant to eat it, even as Derek is massacring his own plate like a savage from a horror movie. Derek notices Stiles only picking at the rice on the side, avoiding the meat altogether, and he points his fork at it. “Eat it.”

“I have never eaten a duck before,” he complains, poking at the meat with a grimace. 

“It tastes like chicken.”

“That’s what they say about human flesh, too.”

“Stiles,” Derek pushes Stiles’ plate closer to him, gives him a serious look. “Try it. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to eat it, but you have to try it.” 

Stiles does not want to eat it. He makes a face and huffs, even as he’s cutting a piece off with his knife and forking it up, bring it up to his eye line so he can look closer at it. It smells good, even he has to admit that, but it is weird to think about this thing having been a duck on a pond somewhere before Derek came along and killed it. Stiles knows, the circle of life and all that, but…still. 

All the same, he eats it. Chews it, swallows it, all the while with Derek staring at him to make sure he doesn’t spit it out, probably. 

“Okay,” Stiles says, slowly. “It’s not bad.” Truthfully, it’s actually really, really fucking good. But Stiles will not give Derek the satisfaction of admitting it out loud. He just quietly cuts off another bite and eats it. 

“I never knew you were so squeamish,” Derek says. “I thought you witches were dark sided.”

“I am dark sided. Trust me.” 

“Whatever you say.”

**

Stiles is sitting on Derek’s couch eating cereal, watching Netflix underneath one of Derek’s knitted blankets, when there are three hard knocks on the front door. Derek takes a huge bite of his own cereal, chews it, doesn’t move, even as Stiles curiously tries to peak through the front window to see who it is. Derek says, mouth full, “it’s McCall.”

“ _Scott_?” Stiles whisper-screams this, going rigid. He quickly puts his bowl down and tries to look like someone who has not been shacked up with Derek Hale for three entire days wiling the time away by having sex and eating and not a whole hell of a lot else. It is impossible to do, seeing as how he’s wearing Derek’s clothes, reeks like Derek, and is sat here with his shoulder pressed right up against Derek’s on the couch.

Derek does not get up to answer it, likely because he simply does not want to, but it doesn’t matter. Derek doesn’t lock his door because he could kill anyone who set foot in here anyway, so Scott is free to open it right up and step inside. So, he does. 

He walks in, and takes in the scene. It’s probably not very pretty for him, especially not with super smell and super intuition. He knows, can smell it everywhere, that Derek and Stiles have been fucking non-stop. It is everywhere. On the couch, in the kitchen, in the bedroom, the shower, every last surface area in this tiny house. Stiles shrinks lower into Derek’s shirt, which he’s wearing because when he showed up here he did not imagine he’d be here for days on end so he didn’t pack a bag and his clothes were…soiled. Let’s say that. 

“I’ve been calling you,” Scott says, putting his hands on his hips. It sort of seems like he’s pointedly not breathing in through his nose, so he doesn’t have to smell it. “You know it’s been three days?”

“Um,” Stiles did know that, but barely. It has been a constant, non-stop loop of breakfast, sex, lunch, sex, dinner, sex, the occasional cool down session of talking or playing a card game or watching a movie. 

Scott meets Derek’s eyes. “Derek,” he says, not very friendly at all. 

“Yeah,” Derek mutters back. No greeting whatsoever. 

“You’ve got work to do, bills to pay, rent is due,” Scott reminds him, and Stiles blinks. Oh, right. Real life shit. He doesn’t have an actual job, not in the literal sense, but he does have…an etsy shop, where he peddles home made candles and other witchy nonsense to humans who fancy themselves occultish. Believe it or not, he’s pretty good at it, so it pays the bills – after all, his only real skills are magical, so of course, any real human job wouldn’t really cut it for him. “You’ve gotten, like, twenty orders, and I can’t do them all by myself.” 

Stiles looks at Derek, who looks back at him. He says, “I kinda have to go.”

Derek does not look pleased with this information. If he had his way, probably he’d keep Stiles in here for the rest of their living days, having sex and eating on an endless loop like some kind of never ending porn movie. Honestly, Stiles likes the sound of it, too, but these past few days have been exhausting and taxing on his emotional state, seeing as how up until very recently, Stiles wasn’t even speaking to Derek, and now they’re fucking like rabbits. 

Scott stands and looks around. He, too, has never been here before, and he looks surprised to see it’s an actual place and not a hole in the ground Derek curls up in at night. “This is a nice place,” he comments, because even to people he fucking hates, he can be friendly and polite. 

As Stiles gets up from the couch and starts getting ready to go, finding his wallet and phone where they’re tossed aside untouched on the coffee table from disuse, Derek grunts some half assed response, keeping his eyes on Stiles the entire time. 

Stiles goes to Derek’s stacked washer and dryer in the corner of the kitchen and pulls his jeans and t-shirt and underwear out from the dryer, folding them up against his chest and hunting for his shoes. Honestly, he has no idea where he left him – he hasn’t been outside in days. “They’re right here,” Derek points to the pile of Stiles’ shoes and socks next to the couch without needing to be asked. He puts his own bowl of cereal down next to Stiles’ and stands up, ignoring Scott’s existence completely. 

Stiles pulls his socks on, then his shoes, Derek’s eyes on him the entire time. It is a very intense, focused stare. These past few days, Stiles has gotten used to it. “Uh,” Stiles starts, rubbing his hand through his hair, still damp from the shower. “Well…” It’s really hard to know where to go from here. 

“Will you let me over at your place?” Derek asks, gaze serious. He sort of seems very unhappy with the idea of Stiles leaving at all, but he is not about to chain Stiles to the bed anytime soon because he’s not an actual psycho – but he is a werewolf. So he sort of wishes he could, probably. 

“Yeah, okay,” Stiles agrees, perking up a bit. “We can – we can –“ have more absolutely ridiculous sex is the only thing that comes to mind, so Scott makes a gagging noise and heads out onto the porch to wait, because he can’t take it anymore. “…order pizza and stuff.” 

“All right.” 

“Okay.”

“So, tonight.”

“Tonight, yes.” Stiles is not moving. The goodbye has been implied and all of his things are cradled in his arms, but he’s not leaving. Derek leans in and hugs him, this tight, gripping thing that lasts for far longer than any normal hug is supposed to, and still, Stiles does not move. It’s the physical version of _no, you hang up, first_ , and it is embarrassing. 

“Christ, it’s just until tonight!” Scott barks from the porch, and Stiles pulls out of Derek’s arms and clears his throat, feeling strange and embarrassed. 

“Okay, well,” Stiles says, taking his first few steps toward the door. He really does not want to leave. He likes Derek’s house. It’s quiet and there’s no one around and he has nice appliances and a really nice shower and his bed is comfortable and there are no nightmares or anything really bad here, at all. Plus, Derek is here. “Bye.”

Derek stands with his arms over his chest, watching him go, no readable expression on his face. He seems angry, but that’s his automatic setting, so it’s impossible to know what he’s really thinking. Scott closes the door behind them, and Derek is out of sight, so Stiles feels a sort of separation anxiety he never knew he could have, before. When his mother used to let her raven fly around and it wouldn’t come back soon enough, she’d fly into panic mode, Stiles remembers – this is sort of like that, but almost…worse. 

He gets choked up in the Jeep, even as Scott huffs and puffs in the passenger seat. He had probably ran here, so his car is nowhere in sight, and he’s trapped with Stiles in the small space, smelling sex and all manner of other unmentionable acts on him. “So this is really going on, huh?” He is aggravated about it, like now this is something he has to fucking deal with. Stiles doesn’t say anything back, his hands gripping the steering wheel as he backs out of Derek’s driveway. “I thought we were mad at him.”

“Well,” Stiles starts, then doesn’t finish. Truthfully, he has no explanations for what’s going on, here. 

“I thought he hurt your feelings.”

They’re driving down the dirt road, bumps and all, and Derek’s house is gone in the rear view mirror. “He did, but he’s…” he clears his throat. He is really thinking about crying. “…my familiar. What do you want me to say?”

“Gross,” Scott decides, and Stiles guesses it is, it really is. “I saw Laura at the grocery store and she avoided me like I have the Black Plague.”

Stiles snorts and rolls his eyes. “I bet she did. She should be really embarrassed and terrified to see me or any of my friends, honestly.” He imagines that Laura ducked behind a display or flat out ran out of the store when she saw Scott, because newsflash – she’s not as apt to deal with her own consequences or her own misgivings as everyone seems to think she is. Just like her brother. 

“So, what is it like?” Scott asks, and they’re at the intersection that takes them off of the dirt road onto the main one surrounded by trees until they hit civilization. “To find your familiar? Like, to be with him and everything? Is it everything you always thought?” 

When Stiles was growing up, he imagined all sorts of different scenarios involving his familiar. He would dream about having a dog as his familiar because he wasn’t allowed to have any pets growing up, a silly black lab that would follow him everywhere, would go on road trips with him, go swimming, all of that. Then when he was older, he imagined a boyfriend that would always call back and always be there for him and would go on dates with him and be his best friend. 

Derek, somehow, is both of those fantasies in one. Different, of course, because Derek is serious and crazy and a bit of an asshole, but still, the framework is there. Stiles doesn’t know how to explain that, so he just says, “he’s sort of a nutcase,” instead, which makes Scott laugh. 

“Well, has he been nice to you?”

“To a point,” Stiles smirks. “As nice as Derek Hale can be.” 

“It is hard to imagine him nice,” Scott looks out the window, like he’s really trying to picture it. 

Then, Stiles is imagining Derek sitting all by himself in his house in the woods and he gets this overwhelming wave of sadness, like he’s abandoning him or something, so he has to think about something else. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he confesses to his best friend, who nods like he gets it, but does not, not at all. “He is such an asshole, and he’s…I don’t know him.”

“But you do,” Scott assesses, and he’s right.

Somehow, Stiles does. Innately. Like knowing the back of his hand, he knows Derek Hale. 

But the reality is, no matter what is there in his heart where Derek is concerned, there is still so, so much about him that he does not know. That he is scared to find out.


	5. If

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I could’ve spent a lot more time screwing around with this, but the truth is there was absolutely no plot left and I’m not one for writing “we’re together now and nothing happens” stories, although they are fun to read lmfao. So I tied it up real quick.

When Derek walks into Stiles’ bedroom, the first thing he says is, “whoa.” 

Unbelievably, in spite of how long the two of them have known each other, Derek has never actually set foot in here. He had been in Stiles’ bedroom back at his dad’s house maybe a handful of times at most, but that bedroom wasn’t really anything like this one. Back then, Stiles was only just starting to get good at magic, was only just beginning to do research and learn about what it is he could do. That bedroom is the polar opposite of what this one is. 

Stiles has got books. That seems to be the thing that Derek is struck the most by. Stacks of them, reaching up to the ceiling, spilling into his closet, and out of his closet, buried under his bed, some of them _in_ his bed, on his desk, on the floor, everywhere. Not to mention the candles and the spooky shit that covers nearly every flat surface of the space. 

“Yeah,” Stiles says, plopping down on his bed and gesturing around himself like it isn’t a big deal. “I live this way.” 

Derek steps inside, his eyes scanning and scanning – the problem is, it can’t all be taken in at once. The room needs to be viewed in sections, otherwise you’ll just get information overload. “You read a lot.” 

“That’s to put it lightly.” Christ, he’s practically got books spilling out of his window into the backyard. “You wanna sit?” He pats the bed next to him, so Derek moves and sits down, so the bed dips a bit. He takes his jacket off, shrugging it behind him into the mussed sheets, and then he just sits there. 

They sit there in silence for what feels like an eternity. It’s so quiet Stiles can hear the clock across his bedroom ticking, ticking, ticking…

They haven’t seen each other since this morning, and everything before that was mostly just fucking, and fucking some more, and then, for good measure, kissing a bit. They talked, yes, but mostly about things that didn’t…matter? Regardless, Stiles had been insanely attached to him during their time together, and then it was hard to leave him. He could tell that it was hard for Derek to let him go, as well, but they had parted and spent almost an entire nine hours not being with one another. 

When Stiles had opened his front door and seen Derek standing there, he would’ve expected to feel something. He did, to be fair. But it wasn’t what he would’ve thought. He had felt awkward, like now that they weren’t mindlessly touching each other, he wasn’t sure what to say. 

“So,” Stiles starts, drawing the single syllable out far longer than necessary. “What’d you do today?”

Derek shrugs. He’s blunt, honest to the point of a fault, so it’s no surprise he says, “thought about fucking you, for the most part.”

“Is that what this whole thing is for you?” Stiles furrows his brow and turns his body, so he and Derek are facing each other directly. “For werewolves, is that blood bond thing all about sex? Like, is it all animalistic and primal bullshit?”

Another shrug. “So far.”

“Well, for me, it’s about being connected here,” he points to his chest, where his heart and soul live, where there is a fire burning with Derek’s name on it. “Sex is fun, but maybe you’d like to spend some time, I don’t know, actually getting to know me?” 

Derek taps his fingers on his knee and he looks at Stiles, and he seems to be thinking. He thinks, like his brain is buffering, trying to come up with something to say. After all, saying the right thing at the right time is not one of Derek Hale’s strong suits. When he does finally speak, his voice is very even. “It isn’t just about sex,” he offers, the words coming out slowly as though they’re being pulled out of him, “but I am not a conversationalist. Sex is how I communicate.”

“Sex isn’t communication,” Stiles argues, shaking his head, but Derek is serious and resolute.

“It is for my people.”

Okay, Stiles thinks, taking in a deep breath. Okay. So, Derek has a point. Werewolves are, as Stiles has said many any times before, an ancient primal beast. No matter how much time passes or how far into the 21st century they get, some things, like traditions, remain in Derek’s blood whether he likes it or not. Stiles thinks about how when Derek has sex with him, it isn’t just the in and out, or the touching, or the kissing – all the things Stiles has gotten good at from his many trysts with other men. 

It’s this all-encompassing act, that’s almost hard to put it into words. Derek goes inside of him, all the way, and holds him down and bites him and leaves marks on him. This, to Derek, is a form of speaking that Stiles never really learned to understand. To connect with someone in a base, physical way is all Derek knows how to do. To him, it’s language. To Stiles, it’s just sex. 

“This is why wolves and witches don’t typically screw around with one another,” he says, sighing and rubbing at his face. “I feel like you and I are from different fucking planets.” 

“Do you wonder why it is that we’re connected?” Derek asks him, and Stiles sighs again, because he has no answers to that. “Why you and I? If all of history suggests that we have nothing in common because of our lineages, then why?”

There is a reason. There must be. They know each other from another time, another life, another century, Stiles is sure of it. They are reincarnations of previous ancestors, their blood passed down and down and down the line of their own people. It’s maddening to think that they may never know what drove those two people together, all that time ago, in spite of everything in the universe that would’ve kept them apart. 

In a way, it doesn’t matter. 

“Would you mind if I did a reading on you?” Stiles asks, already reaching out to grab his favorite deck off of his desk to begin shuffling, shuffling. 

Derek seems to be opening his mouth to protest, but Stiles cuts him off with a finger in the air. 

“If we do your things, then we have to do mine, too.” 

Derek frowns. He doesn’t like magic, or fortune telling, because it makes his tail twitch and his nose itch. But he gestures like _go ahead_ , so Stiles scoots back to make space in between their bodies for the cards to go. 

Derek’s eyes watch as Stiles fans the cards out in a perfect arch, even on the uneven surface. He watches Stiles feel around the edges, watches him pull them all together and shuffle them, just to arch them out again like it’s a natural movement for him. Derek says, “you are ridiculously good at this.”

“It’s my specialty.”

“I thought clairvoyance was your specialty.”

“Fortune and luck in general,” he shrugs, with a smile. He knows that Derek doesn’t get it, but at least he doesn’t roll his eyes and mutter about hocus pocus again like he usually does. 

Stiles pulls four cards out and lays them face up, so they’re facing Stiles and backwards for Derek. Derek leans over them and looks at the pictures, and they mystify him – he doesn’t get them, not at all, and his face portrays that perfectly. But Stiles has learned how to interpret the mysteries of these cards so well he could practically do it blind, feeling for the creases in the cards. 

Stiles laughs when he sees the reading. It is laughable, hilarious, that if Stiles had just done this to Derek weeks ago, before the trip ever started, all of his questions would’ve been answered, and nothing that had transpired on that trip would have needed to happen. It’s obvious, what Stiles sees in front of him in flying colors – but then it is fate, that if Stiles had ever asked Derek before if he could do a reading on him, Derek would’ve violently refused it. They were meant to go on that trip, whether they liked it or not. 

He points to the first card. “The moon,” he says, which Derek could’ve guessed; it’s just a picture of the moon and some clouds, purple and blue and shiny. Then, the second card. “The chain,” he says, which Derek doesn’t like.

“Like I’m in jail.” 

“Not even close,” he smirks. “You are connected to someone else through fate.”

Derek rolls his eyes. “Spooky.” 

The third card. “The palm of fortune.”

“Meaning I have bad luck,” he guesses, staring at the card – it’s a hand, the lines in it pronounced, blood on the fingers. It seems ominous to the untrained eye, but Stiles knows better. 

“It means you have some form of fortune in your life,” he explains, and before Derek can guess something about money, Stiles cuts him off. “Meaning magic. Mine, specifically.”

“Oh.” He still doesn’t get it. 

Stiles moves on to the fourth card, the final nail in the coffin. He points to it and smiles, could almost burst out laughing. “The eternal rose.”

Derek snorts. He thinks it’s funny – which is fine. Derek has his whole entire life to roll his eyes and laugh and make fun of Stiles’ magic, but it won’t matter either way. “What does all this mean?”

Stiles leans back, his palms on his knees, and stares at the cards some more. “It means that you and I are meant to be together. Obviously,” he gestures, his arm sweeping over the cards, but Derek only blinks at them and doesn’t seem convinced. “The moon connecting fortune with the chain and sealing it off with eternity,” he lifts one brow. “Yikes. Looks like you’re stuck with me for real.” 

Derek looks at the cards, and looks, until Stiles collects them back into their deck and then sets it aside. They’re quiet again, with Derek seeming pensive and lost in thought, and Stiles feeling satisfied with the knowledge that all of the signs he has been given, all of the mysteries of his life he had never been able to solve, are all finally starting to make sense. 

“I’m thinking about when we were at the Holiday Inn with Laura, and she had said not just that you were my familiar, but that you were in love with me.” 

Derek frowns, like this is a big embarrassment to him. “So, what?” 

“So,” Stiles repeats with a light laugh. “So she just said that like it was no big deal, and you haven’t mentioned it. But I find it weird, how you and I didn’t know each other and still don’t, but you could come to the conclusion somehow that you’re in love with me.”

Derek is pensive again. He looks at his hands, just so he doesn’t have to look Stiles in the face. “I don’t need to know you. That’s another thing you don’t get about my culture. Whether I know your favorite color or not, it doesn’t matter.”

“You knew that when I was sixteen, also?”

“No,” Derek shakes his head, looks out the window. He is embarrassed, because he’s not usually so vulnerable, so Stiles just lets him be to speak on his own terms in his own time. “I knew when the first nightmare came. When I woke up I was so…shaken by it. You know? Totally freaked, at the prospect of you drowning, of me not being able to get to you,” at this, he finally looks Stiles right in the face. “You know I’d let most people drown, right? You should know that about me.” 

Stiles does know that. Has known that. Derek is not a generous, kind, or selfless person. He is very strict to himself, cares about what he cares about and could give a fuck less about people and things that he doesn’t. He is no hero, Stiles has always known that; doing what is right is a chore to him more than it is something that he enjoys doing or even feels necessarily compelled to do. 

“But, not you. So.”

So. That’s all there is to it, for him. Derek would go through the fire, his ultimate fear and his biggest nemesis, just to jump into the ocean to keep Stiles from downing. There is almost no one else on earth he would do this for. Just Stiles. Maybe Laura, on the right day. 

It is without a doubt the closest to a romantic proclamation of love that Stiles has ever gotten out of Derek, so it makes his stomach do a bit of a backflip, like he’s got butterflies. That creeping sensation from this morning of wanting to be with Derek constantly, all the time, never letting him go, is coming back, slowly but surely. 

“You and I are two sides of the same coin,” Stiles says, and Derek nods, like he’s finally starting to get that, now. “I just…feel that everything I don’t have,” the candor, the viciousness, the violence, “you have. And everything that you don’t have,” the gentleness, the empathy, the kindness, “I have. Like together we make one whole person.”

Derek says, “I feel like we morph together pretty well when I’m inside of you.” 

And, there it is. Derek’s incessant and unstoppable desire to have sex. It seems to be particularly prevalent around the times Stiles forces him to speak aloud his thoughts and feelings. 

“You’re starting to smell less like me,” he goes on, leaning in to press his nose right against Stiles’ neck. Stiles squawks as Derek sniffs him, dragging it all the way up his neck to his jawline, pressing his hand against Derek’s chest. “I need to – I need to get it all over you, again.” 

“Uh,” Stiles laughs, this high, breathy thing that makes him feel stupid. “Scott is still here, so.”

“I don’t care,” Derek promises, reaching up underneath Stiles’ shirt to paw around his bare chest. “He should know who you belong to, anyway.”

“Uh,” Stiles says this, again, because Derek tends to make him go brain dead whenever the crazy werewolf sex starts up. “I think he knows that regardless of whether or not we force him to listen to us bang, trust me. Derek –“ he uses both of his hands to push, so Derek takes the hint and flops down on his ass with an indignant huff, his hands off of Stiles’ body for the moment. 

Christ. His pants are tented. That alone had gotten him up to full mast. 

“Seriously,” Stiles says. “You have to talk to me. You can’t just fuck your scent onto me and call it good, you know.”

“Fine,” he agrees, and he seems perfectly happy to pretend like he doesn’t have a raging hard on, for the moment. “What do you want to talk about?”

Stiles taps his chin. There are so many, many thousands of questions that he has to ask of his familiar. It’s almost difficult to start somewhere. “How about, what life was like before your family passed?”

“It was fine,” he offers. 

Stiles waits, gesturing with one hand for more information. 

With this great big exhalation, as though he’s being tormented in a cell for information somewhere, Derek rolls his eyes. “I had nine siblings including Laura. My dad died when I was young, so it was just my mom raising us all. She was –“ he pauses. His eyes go far away. He seems at a loss for words. “She was my best friend.”

Stiles puts his hand on Derek’s back, rubbing slow circles. There is a big sadness in the room, one that Derek does not touch, or speak about, but is known either way. 

“Then, when everything happened…I lost touch with the human side of me, you know? I figured it was the human in me that fucked everything up to begin with, because I liked a human who did this to me, so…and then I lived in the woods for a while. I ate squirrels, mostly.”

Stiles gets this image of a wolfed out Derek ripping the head off of a live squirrel with his teeth and he almost smiles, at the same time he finds it disturbing. 

“It was a couple of years before I came back and was relatively normal again, with Laura’s help. I just wanted to…disappear, mostly. Then I met you and in that moment, I knew you were strange. I knew you were a witch, because I remembered that family name. I knew there was something off about you. Then you turned sixteen, and,” he gestures around himself, as if to say the rest is history. “I’ve humiliated myself enough, now.”

“What’s humiliating to you about telling me your life?” 

“Because it’s idiotic,” he shrugs. “Who cares if I ate squirrels for two years?” 

Stiles points to himself, one long finger. “Me.”

Derek pulls his hands together in between his knees, lacing the fingers together. He lowers his head and glances at Stiles, then looks away. He takes in a deep breath, going tense around the shoulders, like he really doesn’t want to say what he’s about to say next. “You know how you can – you can talk to your mother?”

Stiles knows where this is going, immediately. He sucks in a big breath and moves even closer to Derek on the bed, pressing their bodies up against each other and wrapping one arm around the other man’s shoulders. “Derek, I cannot do that,” he says, his voice gentle, as though he’s speaking to a spooked animal. “When I bring my mother up, it’s – it’s different. She was a witch, she was my blood relative. It’s…not as black as other magicks. Like the magic I’d have to use to bring up someone like your mother. And that aside, there is no telling what she would be like, or any of your siblings, because when people pass under…duress, uh… when there’s a stressor involved in the death, it’s – the channels get muddled and bad things can latch onto the pain of it, and they can come up with them. I can’t. I am so sorry.”

Derek nods, like he figured. There’s this sort of look on his face that says he is used to being let down, of not getting the one thing he wants the most in the world, and it really hurts Stiles to see that look on Derek’s face. 

“There are other things I can do,” he offers, voice gentle. “We can do the ouija board sometime, if you’d like. Or we can try to communicate with her through the spirit channels, but you never really know who you’re gonna get on the other line.”

Derek says, “that sounds unbelievably creepy.”

“Oh, it is,” he promises. “I got a demon on the line once. Not a fun conversation. He said he’d cross over and hurt me. I was, like, eleven, dude. It’s not child’s play, that’s for sure, but I’m better at it now, and…I don’t know. It’s worth a shot.”

There’s a beat or two. Derek looks Stiles in the eye, so serious and intense, and he says, “you are the most selfless person I have ever had in my life.”

“Oh,” Stiles blinks. In reality, he’s not that kind or generous, but he’s certainly not an asshole – for Derek to say that Stiles and Stiles alone is the nicest person he’s ever met…that really says something for the company he has chosen to keep. 

“I want to fuck you so bad.”

“Oh, my god…” Stiles rolls his eyes. Every touching moment, ruined by Derek’s libido. “Fine, holy shit. But do not blame me if Scott gets traumatized.” 

“He’s fine,” Derek insists, already climbing on top of Stiles and pulling at his jeans.

**

Stiles shudders and digs his heels into Derek’s bare back, hoisting himself up on the palms of his hands so he can look down at where Derek is kneeling in between Stiles’ spread legs. Derek pulls all of Stiles into his mouth, so Stiles whines and grabs onto his hair, tugging at it as hard as he wants because he knows that he could never really hurt him.

With a pop, Derek drops Stiles from his mouth and lowers his neck, laving his tongue over Stiles’ drawn up sac, before licking up the length, all the way to the tip. Stiles hisses and pumps his hips, just once, a silent plea for him to be back inside of Derek’s mouth. Derek ignores him, using one hand to gently stroke up and down, while the other cups Stiles’ balls, almost kneading them with his fingers. “You’re being a dick,” Stiles tells him, a bit breathless. He has a sheen of sweat on his brow, and he’s exhausted, completely spent – because Derek can’t ever just have sex with him once and call it good like any normal person.

No. It’s one in the morning. They’ve been having sex on and off for four hours. 

“That’s an interesting way to talk to the person who’s in complete control of whether or not you come.”

Stiles huffs a laugh and bites his lip. Derek is very in charge when it comes to sex, in a way that doesn’t make Stiles uncomfortable at all. He’s just…direct. And he knows what he wants. Those are two things that many men can’t ever seen to wrap their heads around, so Stiles is beyond thrilled with the way Derek treats him. 

Derek sucks Stiles down again, this time with the clear intent of getting him off. He moves quickly, so Stiles’ toes curl and his eyes roll back in his head from the waves of pleasure – until he spills down Derek’s throat, body tightening up as he practically rips Derek’s hair out of his head. 

Before Stiles has even fully come down from the orgasm, Derek is climbing up on top of him and forcing their mouths together. Stiles doesn’t care that Derek just had his dick in his mouth – he kisses back, fully committed. When they pull apart, breathing the same air, Derek kisses Stiles’ neck, where there are still plenty of marks leftover from the past few days and even just in the past couple of hours. The sex is always crazy, always does something to Stiles’ brain, always makes him feel like he’s walking on eggshells or is in another dimension or is floating off in space, somewhere – not that he’s not himself, or that Derek isn’t. 

But the two of them together, like this. It really isn’t just sex. Derek is right about that. 

Derek licks at Stiles’ ear and bites him playfully. Stiles is completely into it, completely into him, and in this moment, he thinks he could just…let Derek do whatever he wants to him. No second thoughts. Stiles blurts out, “you can bite me, if you want.”

There’s a pause. Derek’s mouth stops moving, and he pulls out of Stiles’ neck to look him full in the face. He searches, looking to see if Stiles is serious. “You mean, really bite you.”

Stiles is nervous, but he wants it all the same. He swallows a lump in his throat and says, “uh…yeah.”

“It’s going to hurt,” Derek reminds him, as though he’s trying to spook Stiles out of it. Or, maybe try and really drill the point home. “It’s going to really fucking hurt, Stiles. You don’t have to do this on my account.”

“I’m not,” he defends – he’s still panting from his orgasm and the kissing, still flushed, naked, Derek very much the same. “I want you to bite me, and…complete the bond.” 

Derek looks at him some more. “It’s going to hurt,” he repeats, and Stiles nods his head, like yes, he knows, just get it over with. Derek licks his lips, his eyes flickering to a specific spot on Stiles’ neck just briefly as though he’s already picked the precise spot he wants to bite, had done so years ago, and then meets Stiles’ eyes again. “I don’t want to hurt you. This is a…it’s werewolf nonsense, old rites of passage. It’s just a symbol, it won’t really do anything.”

Stiles can tell, can see it all over Derek’s face, that there is nothing that he wants more in this world than to bite Stiles and finish claiming him. It is really, really obvious, even though he seems to be talking them both out of it. From what Stiles has gathered from his own research, bites between werewolves and their chosen partners are, like, sacred. It’s kind of like the Eucharist, almost, for lack of something else to equate it to. 

Derek wants to, so Stiles sucks in a deep breath and says, “do it, come on.” 

There’s this second of hesitation, Derek looking between Stiles’ neck and Stiles’ face. Then, Stiles gets to watch as Derek’s canines elongate, extend past his lips – long, dagger-like teeth, sharp as knives. It nearly psychs Stiles out to see them, but he clears his throat and holds his ground.

He moves to shift, just a bit, because he’s in a bit of an uncomfortable position, but Derek says, “don’t move,” in a growl, so Stiles goes completely still.

“Okay,” he says, swallowing nervously. 

“Do not move,” Derek repeats, and he’s leaning closer, closer still. Stiles can hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears, the blood rushing, and he has this thought of closing his eyes, but he won’t do it. He wants to see it. “One wrong move and I could rip your throat out. Stay still.”

“Okay,” he repeats. His voice quakes, just slightly. “Just – just – I’m nervous.” 

They’re close enough that when Derek looks him in the eyes, his lashes brush against Stiles’ cheek. “I would sooner chew my own arms off than cause you real physical damage.” 

Stiles knows that, he does. He sucks in a deep breath and nods, so Derek knows to keep going. Slowly, so Stiles feels it when Derek’s breath blows across his neck. Stiles tenses, because he knows it’s going to hurt, more than anything else that’s ever happened to him. He’s never broken a bone, never sprained anything even. He only has gotten little cuts and bruises and scrapes, never anything major. 

This is major. This is going to feel like getting stabbed with a fucking sword. 

Derek picks a spot. The junction between Stiles’ neck and his shoulder, the perfect place. He kisses it, once, and then he says, “do not move,” one last time. With that, he sinks his teeth in.

No warning, no nothing. It hurts. It’s immediate, like getting burned, the all-consuming pain of it. Not only is he getting four gigantic fucking teeth driven deep into his flesh, but accompanying that bite is the venom of a werewolf which would typically turn anyone else, but that his body viciously fights against and rejects. It sets his skin on fire, makes him sweat, convulse.

His body’s self-preservation instincts kick in, and it tries to shy away from the bite, crying out, but Derek grabs him and locks him down into place with a firm grip. Stiles says, “it fucking hurts,” even as Derek still has his neck and shoulder locked between his jaws. “Oh my god, it fucking – ow, ow –“

Derek growls, low. It’s a warning. Stiles has never heard him make this sound before, so he goes still and tries to be as quiet as possible; it’s hard. It hurts, so he bites his lip and whimpers and cries, just a little. This is way worse than he imagined, but then, he knew it would be. 

When the teeth finally retract, and the bite itself is over with, Derek moves immediately into healing the wound. He licks at the blood, which is so fucking beyond gross Stiles can’t even really get into it, lapping it all up before laving his tongue against the wounds themselves. Stiles jerks and cries out, because that hurts too, but Derek keeps licking Stiles’ bite, soothing it as best as he can. 

“Ow,” Stiles says again, his lower lip trembling. 

“It’s okay,” Derek tells him, looking at the bite to assess it for himself. Stiles can’t see it, but he imagines it – four holes in his body, leaking blood, all mixed with Derek’s saliva. “It’s okay. Come here,” he pulls Stiles in for a hug, pressing their bodies together tight. Stiles presses his face into Derek’s neck and cries a bit, while Derek just hugs him tighter. “You did so well. It’s okay. It’s healing, it’s healing over right now.”

“Ow,” he repeats, because it’s all he can say right now. Motherfucking ouch. 

“It’s fine,” the bite starts to actually feel better, but for all Stiles knows, that’s just Derek leeching the pain out of him bit by bit. “Now you’re all mine.”

Stiles isn’t particularly sure, in this moment, how much he’s really dealing with human Derek. It is, after all, the middle of the night, and Stiles did just coax him into doing the most werewolfy thing imaginable – and now Derek is here cradling Stiles like a newborn fawn, whispering in his ear and licking up his blood. This has got to be mostly the wolf that’s in Stiles’ bed, right now. 

“That hurt so bad,” Stiles complains, because he’s not much of a trooper. All things said, he’s a little bitch, and he’s whiny to boot. He’s pressed into Derek’s body, still bleeding, still shaking, but even he can feel that there is a shift happening in this room, because of that bite. Stiles’ body may reject the werewolf gene like spitting out poison, but it leaves something else behind, something that his body can’t quite fight off. 

Something he doesn’t really have a name for. 

“You’re mine,” Derek repeats, voice muffled by Stiles’ neck. “I’ll fucking kill anyone who tries to touch you.”

“That’s nice,” Stiles tells him, patting him on the back a bit. What else is he supposed to say? “I’m tired. Can we sleep?”

Derek wraps Stiles around himself like a blanket, holding him tight, arranging them together on top of Stiles’ pillows. He doesn’t let go, even long after he falls asleep.

**

In the morning, Stiles pokes at the bite in the bathroom mirror. It is, just like Derek had said, healing a lot faster than a normal wound would, but it is still red and enflamed, and hurts like hell to the touch. It will likely be scabbing over before the day’s out, but for now, Stiles slaps a bandage over it and calls it good. When Scott sees it, he will likely go absolutely fucking bananas – he hasn’t even bitten Allison for Christ’s sake. It’s old, old werewolf lore we’re dealing with, here, yet here Stiles is, walking around with a werewolf bite like it’s no big deal.

Just as Stiles is smoothing the sticky part of the bandaid onto his untouched skin, Derek opens the bathroom door, startling Stiles into stumbling back a step or two. He clatters into the sink and knocks the toothpaste off the edge, so it lands with a thump by their feet. “Jesus Christ,” Stiles says, hand pressed against his chest. “You know, if we’re going to do this, you need to fucking announce yourself.” 

Derek doesn’t respond to that. He’s fully dressed, his clothes all wrinkled from where they had wound up in a pile the night before, but he at least looks well rested. He reaches out and runs his fingers along the bandage, meeting Stiles’ eyes. “Does it still hurt?”

“Yes,” he says, and Derek winces.

“You shouldn’t have let me do that.”

“It’s just a flesh wound,” Stiles waves it off, nonchalant as ever. 

“It’s not,” Derek says this like a promise, he really fucking means it. “It’s a lot more than that, to me. You didn’t have to do that.” 

Stiles leans against the sink, placing his palms on either side of his hips, giving Derek a very critical look. “You know, you’ve already been inside of me my entire life, whether I knew it or not. And I have been inside of you. Let’s not waste each other’s time anymore than we already have, by pretending we’re not both all in this, now. Of course I let you do that to me. It’s important to you.” 

Derek takes Stiles by his hips, both hands gripping hard, the way Derek’s touches are always hard, almost too rough, but at the same time, it’s obvious he’s holding back. Derek is not one for big romantic proclamations, so instead of offering one here, where it would be expected, he just says, “I will announce myself from now on.” Then, after a brief kiss, Derek looks him in his eyes again. “I want to be better at this.”

“At what?”

“Being…in a relationship.”

“Oh,” Stiles blinks. “It’s not like I’m so great at it.”

A rueful smile crosses Derek’s face, not reaching his eyes. “You know what to say all the time. I can’t…do that.” 

What he means is, Stiles is open, and that means he can say things like what he just said, and what he said last night, and he can be nice and can be romantic, like people are on television. Derek can barely mutter his way through his own family history, can’t hardly look Stiles in the eyes whenever he says anything remotely vulnerable, can’t be emotional, can’t always verbalize the thoughts in his head. Considering he spent two entire years not that long ago shifted into a wolf wandering the woods doing god knows what, this is not surprising and nor is it necessarily his fault. 

“I’m not super concerned about it, if it makes you feel better. So, you’re not great at talking. I think I talk enough for the both of us. You are a good listener, at least.” 

“You don’t really think so.”

“Uh, yeah I do,” Stiles snorts. “You remembered my coffee order from the one singular time I ever ordered coffee with you, a year and a half ago.”

Derek acts as if no one has ever paid him this particular compliment before; it surprises him. Stiles feels bad, because people are always so shitty to Derek about every fucking thing, just because he doesn’t act the way they want him to. Everyone wants him to be this well adjusted normal fucking guy walking around smiling and laughing at jokes and being a good neighbor. 

Well, he’s not well adjusted. He’s not normal. So what? 

Before either of them can say anything else, Scott steps into the bathroom doorway and peers in at the two of them, frowning. “Uh, some people in this house use the bathroom for things aside from making goo goo eyes at each other.” 

Derek looks at him, and for us one single second, Stiles gets the distinct impression that Derek wants to hit him. Really badly. Maybe only for Stiles’ sake, Derek just grunts and takes Stiles by the wrist, guiding him past Scott and out into the hallway, back to Stiles’ bedroom. 

He closes the door behind them and huffs, gesturing with his thumb. “I don’t know how you live with that.” 

“You know, you might think about getting along with Scott,” Stiles says, a call back to something he had said in a hotel room, all the way back when they were barely speaking. Seems like a different life, now. “If you want to be with me, that is.” 

“You keep saying that.”

“Keep saying what?”

“ _If_ I want to be with you. _If_ we’re going to be doing this.” 

“Well,” Stiles rubs the back of his neck. 

“You know I bit you, which means that I’m with you forever whether you want me there or not,” he leans against Stiles’ desk and crosses his arms, raising his eyebrows and smirking. He looks particularly…happy. Which is not a word one usually uses in the same sentence as Derek Hale. But he does. In his own little way. “You still have the nerve to say if.” 

There is something about living in the human world that makes things like eternity and forever and _no matter what_ seem like impossibilities. There will always be something in the back of Stiles’ mind, convincing himself that at some point, of course, Stiles and Derek will be no more. They could not be two more different people. They could not be more at odds with each other. There could not be more things in the universe trying to keep them apart, almost as many that want to push them together. 

Even if Stiles packed a bag right now and said he was going to Timbuktu to hide in an underground bunker, Derek would have no choice. He would have to come. All the time that Derek had spent trying to let that fire burn and burn and burn until it ran out of things to consume hasn’t made one single lick of difference. 

It lives inside of Stiles. It will burn as long as both of them are alive. Stiles is certain, now, that when he finally does die however he winds up going, Derek’s broken heart will kill him. He is certain that when they bury him, they will bury him with Derek right next to him. In the afterlife they will still be together. In the next life, even if they try to run from it again, it will be inevitable. 

Another trip across the country, maybe. Another hotel room, two hundred years from now. Another forest fire, somewhere. 

“Do you want to stay over again?” Stiles offers. “You can teach me how to cook. I’m shit at it. Which is surprising, considering potions are second nature to me.”

“There is a bit of a difference between throwing a rat’s tail and some eyeballs in a cauldron, and actually cooking something. So, sure, I’ll teach you.”

“Okay,” Stiles agrees, already feeling giddy at the prospect of getting Derek to himself for an entire day and night, again. There will be hundreds, thousands of days and nights to come, for Derek and Stiles to be together. 

Maybe millions, for all eternity.


End file.
